Delta Asia 80th anniversary | Stanley Au pessimistic about economic prospects

Stanley Au

Issues concerning negative equity and bankruptcy will be aggravated if the already collapsing housing market continues to sink further, said the chairman of Delta Asia Financial Group, Stanley Au, on the sidelines of the group’s 80th anniversary celebrations.
As the market weakens following the gaming industry’s slowdown, Au argued that the lending market has already suffered some negative consequences and hoped that it could recover soon. “As far as I know, the housing market has fallen between 20 percent and 40 or 50 percent,” he claimed.
Following his earlier criticism of the extensive presence of gaming operators in the territory’s economy, he renewed his call to shed excessive foreign labor from the battered gaming industry while allowing small and middle-
scaled enterprises to employ more imported workers.
“The unemployment rate will rise if the ‘virtual economy’ turns bad while if the ‘real economy’ becomes good, the rate will go down,” he stated.
He also added that vocational fallouts of the gaming industry would linger as the younger population still sets their sights on gambling-related jobs, which are still deemed lucrative in the future.
“It has done harm to this generation of local youngsters, who are no longer accustomed to society,” he said while condemning the cash handout scheme, which he believed has made locals “unmotivated.”
As the region still holds about MOP433.6 billion in its fiscal reserve, the group’s head proposed to invest part of the hoard into profitable overseas-
based companies.
Furthermore, local potential sources of talent could also be dispatched to learn about those companies’ operations in managerial positions, he suggested, as a way to respond to the authorities’ long-touted determination to nurture talented individuals from within Macau.
During his address, Au admitted that the group was still reeling from the North Korean money laundering scandal in 2005 when the government’s treasury had to intervene with the bank’s operation following the US authorities’ ban.