Chapter 466 - 214: Pre-holiday Craze

Chapter 466: Chapter 214: Pre-holiday Craze

Jiang Miao reviewed the Quantum Fund’s movements and estimated that its full-scale assault would likely begin on the first trading day after the Spring Festival.

He immediately sent an email to the headquarters of the New Century Fund using a disguised identity.

Meanwhile, in the New Century Investment Fund’s office in Central, Xiangjiang, CEO Zhong Liwen was also looking at trading data from the Hong Kong stock market.

Suddenly, a notification popped up in his private inbox. When he saw the sender’s name, he immediately sat bolt upright and clicked the email open.

He took out a copy of *Dream of the Red Chamber* and, referencing the numbers in the email, began writing the deciphered message in a small notebook.

As he wrote, Zhong Liwen’s hand began to tremble slightly.

’This boss’s intelligence network is terrifyingly strong!’

Even though he had witnessed his mysterious boss’s intelligence capabilities before, Zhong Liwen was still shaken to the core. The thought of defying him became even more remote.

After all, he had been navigating the financial world for over twenty years and knew plenty of its secrets.

Given his mysterious boss’s methods, Zhong Liwen guessed he wasn’t just one person, but a large organization. For an organization like that, killing him would be child’s play.

After deciphering the message, Zhong Liwen promptly deleted the email and reviewed the contents of the small notebook.

The message was extensive, containing 47 separate pieces of intelligence, all concerning the Quantum Fund. The end of the message contained his mysterious boss’s instructions.

"Heh... so that’s the plan. We’re going to trap them and beat them down," Zhong Liwen murmured to himself after reading the intel. He now understood his boss’s intentions.

The Quantum Fund wasn’t just secretly preparing to short and cripple a specific bank. It had also been accumulating shares in 17 other small and medium-sized financial institutions. Their plan was to cripple the target bank, then spread disinformation and engage in aggressive short-selling to trigger a massive financial run across Xiangjiang.

At the same time, Xiangjiang’s fiscal reserves had already dropped from 1.1 trillion Hong Kong Dollars in 2022 to 449.3 billion. The reserves had been shrinking by over a hundred billion annually for the past several years.

There was another reason the Quantum Fund chose to make its move after the Spring Festival. Before the holiday, Xiangjiang would pay out large sums in social benefits, which would further deplete its fiscal reserves.

Many people might not be familiar with Xiangjiang’s welfare system.

Take the Old Age Allowance and the Old Age Living Allowance, for example.

The Old Age Allowance, commonly known as "fruit money," is available to residents aged 70 or older without any means or income test, providing them with 1,135 Hong Kong Dollars per month.

The Old Age Living Allowance provides 3,915 Hong Kong Dollars per month to residents aged 65 or older who meet certain income and asset requirements. Applicants aged 70 and above can also receive an additional payment of 1,385 Hong Kong Dollars per month from the Old Age Allowance.

Xiangjiang currently has a severely aging population. With 21% of its 7.5 million people over the age of 65, this amounts to 1.575 million senior citizens.

While not all seniors are eligible for these allowances, according to official data from Xiangjiang, expenditures for them in the year ’26 had already reached 41.9 billion Hong Kong Dollars.

Combined with other miscellaneous expenditures and a sharp decline in revenue from land sales, Xiangjiang was running a significant deficit.

The Spring Festival was the peak payout period for these allowances, and the Quantum Fund saw this as the perfect opportunity to launch its full-scale assault on Xiangjiang’s financial system, starting on the first trading day after the holiday.

Zhong Liwen wasn’t focused on the Quantum Fund’s overall offensive. Instead, he carefully studied the 47 items in the intelligence report. Twenty-six of them were specifically about the 17 small and medium-sized financial institutions.

He knew perfectly well that the Quantum Fund and its international speculative partners had already secretly acquired significant stakes in these institutions, ranging from 15% to as high as 27%.

A mass sell-off of these stocks would inevitably trigger a panic. Furthermore, these institutions had been targeted for a reason: Western capital firms had plenty of dirt on them. Once that compromising information was leaked, it would amplify the effect of the financial run.

Zhong Liwen’s counter-strategy was simple. After the Quantum Fund launched its assault, but one day before they planned to detonate the targeted institutions, he would act. He would swiftly report to the Xiangjiang Securities and Exchange Commission that these institutions were guilty of major regulatory violations. He would also report that the Quantum Fund was attempting to manipulate these same institutions to crash Xiangjiang’s financial system, thereby triggering an emergency trading halt.

Once trading in those stocks was halted, the shares purchased by the Quantum Fund and its partners would be frozen. They would find themselves in the awkward position of being unable to trigger the collapse.

With this much intelligence, if the Xiangjiang Securities and Exchange Commission still couldn’t defeat the Quantum Fund, Zhong Liwen could only offer them one piece of advice: Go home and plant sweet potatoes.

As for the key mid-sized bank at the center of it all, the New Century Fund could swoop in and snap up its stock at rock-bottom prices.

According to Zhong Liwen’s calculations, if everything went smoothly, their various offshore accounts could acquire another 20% to 30% of the bank’s stock. Combined with the 13.9% they already held, their stake would quickly be large enough for a controlling interest.

Then, Zhong Liwen would use other compromising material in his possession to force the bank’s remaining major shareholders to sell their shares to him. This would raise their total stake to 90%, the threshold required to trigger a mandatory delisting.

Turning a stock trade into a hostile takeover wasn’t typical for a financial speculator, but Zhong Liwen could not defy his boss’s orders.

Having organized his plan, he quickly summoned the firm’s management to assign their tasks.

Soon, within the turbulent undercurrents of Xiangjiang’s financial markets, silent tentacles began to infiltrate the Quantum Fund through various channels.