In the past five years, it has become a ritual for some of the leading figures in financial services to gather each fall on the Greenwich waterfront to discuss key issues affecting the global economy, but now they are looking 8,000 miles to the east.
The Greenwich Economic Forum (GEF) will host its first event outside the U.S., with a conference on Thursday and Friday in Hong Kong. In one of the world’s top financial centers, GEF officials are aiming to leverage the economic re-opening of China, after severe restrictions imposed in the country during the first three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, to help forge closer ties between finance professionals in the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific region.
“It was our intention from the beginning to build a global conference for leaders in finance and to bring that conference to financial centers around the world. We had thought that GEF would have gone to Asia before now, but COVID slowed down that plan,” Bruce McGuire, co-founder and co-chairman of the Greenwich Economic Forum and president of the Connecticut Hedge Fund Association, said in an interview. “Hong Kong was selected because it is the historical Asian financial center and an east-west melting pot.”
The world beyond Greenwich
Since its first annual conference, at the Delamar hotel in Greenwich in November 2018, GEF has established itself as a leading business-events organizer. Its conferences at the Delamar have each attracted several hundred attendees, with the speakers including some of the leading figures in financial services, including Ray Dalio, founder of Westport-based Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge fund managers.
In the past couple of years, GEF has expanded its programming beyond Greenwich, with conferences held in March 2022 and March 2023 in Miami.
At the Greenwich conferences, attendees from China have accounted for the largest group of guests from outside the U.S. The attendees have included representatives of HKEX, a Greenwich conference sponsor, which is Hong Kong’s only securities and derivatives exchange and sole operator of its clearing houses.
Plans for a conference in Hong Kong coalesced after McGuire and fellow GEF co-founder and co-chairman Jim Aiello met in February at the Greenwich Delamar with a delegation from HKEX. About 170 people will attend this week’s gathering in Hong Kong, with HKEX Connect Hall serving as the host site.
“Jim and I had always thought we would go to Asia (with a GEF event), but we didn’t have it in our plans to do it this year,” McGuire said. “It’s when the (Hong Kong) exchange folks came to see us in February. They said, ‘we’d like you to consider doing this with us.’ The timing is kind of interesting because China is just opening back up.”
Hong Kong grew into a global business center under British rule, which ended in 1997, when it returned to Chinese control. It has since reinforced its position as one of the world’s leading hubs for commerce, including financial services. Based on its number of millionaires, Hong Kong ranked No. 7 in the 2023 World’s Wealthiest Cities Report published by Henley & Partners. It has 129,500 “high net worth individuals” with investable wealth of $1 million or more, according to the report. (New York City was No. 1).
The city is familiar territory for Greenwich resident Gene Reilly, one of the conference speakers and the founder of hedge fund manager Greenwich Quantitative Research, which has offices in Greenwich and Manhattan.
“Having spent 19 years living and working in the finance industry in Asia in both Hong Kong and Tokyo, I’m excited to be participating in the inaugural Greenwich Economic Forum in Hong Kong,” Reilly said in an email.
Several prominent investment management firms have offices in Hong Kong — including Stamford-based Point72, Greenwich-based Viking Global Investors and Greenwich-based AQR Capital Management.
Viking declined to comment on its operations in Hong Kong or whether any of its employees would attend the GEF conference. Point72 officials declined to comment on whether anyone from their firm would attend the conference, but noted that their Hong Kong office, which opened in 2006, is the firm’s largest in the Asia-Pacific region. A message left for AQR was not returned.
There are also connections between Connecticut’s financial services industry and mainland China cities. In 2017, Greenwich formalized a sister-city agreement with Hangzhou, a neighboring city of Shanghai that is using Greenwich as an exemplar for the development of its own hub for hedge fund managers. McGuire and Aiello visited Hangzhou in 2016.
“If your intention was to build an office park where a lot of hedge funds and private equity people moved their offices to or worked out of, they’ve done that,” McGuire said. “If you come to the front gate, it says, ‘welcome to the Greenwich of China.’”
Forging connections amid fears of ‘war’
China, the world’s second-largest economy, has ranked for many years as one of the top trading partners of the U.S. But in the past few years, the countries’ relations have frayed. The administration of former President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars in Chinese goods. Last August, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi enraged the ruling Chinese Communist Party with her visit to Taiwan, which is self-ruled, but claimed by China as part of its territory. And then there is the furor among many U.S. elected officials over how TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company manages U.S. users’ data.
Arguably no leader in financial services has sounded alarms about U.S.-China tensions in recent years more than Dalio, who has visited China many times since he first traveled there in 1984.
“The United States and China are in a classic great-power conflict,” Dalio said at the 2021 GEF conference.
Dalio, who last year completed handing over control of Bridgewater, reiterated his concerns in a memo published in late April on LinkedIn that cited two recent trips he took to China.
“What I mean when I say that the U.S. and China are on the brink of war is that it appears that they are close to having a sanctions war and/or military war that neither side wants but many believe will probably happen,” Dalio wrote. “I want to emphasize that by saying that they are on the brink, I don’t mean to say that they will necessarily go over the brink.”
A message left for Bridgewater inquiring whether Dalio or any current Bridgewater employees would attend GEF-Hong Kong was not returned.
While acknowledging the tensions between the U.S. and China, McGuire said that the geopolitical complications have not hindered the planning of the conference.
“People are treating it just like a regular business conference,” he said. “We’re not coordinating this through the government. It’s not like the government of Hong Kong is facilitating any of this. We’re doing it business-to-business. We’re using our partners at the (HKEX) exchange, and our own staff are putting it together.”
Local officials, meanwhile, have expressed support for hedge fund managers, which invest in a range of assets that can include stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, derivatives and real estate. The conference’s scheduled speakers include Joseph H.L. Chan, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government’s under-secretary for financial services and the treasury.
“Hedge fund is an important pillar of our asset management business,” Chan wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this month. “At the end of April this year, Hong Kong continued to be the biggest hedge fund base in Asia by AUM (assets under management). Indeed, our hedge fund market continued to grow steadily over the years.”
