CHASE MANHATTAN'S MAN IN HONG KONG

[Hugh Fierce] WAS reared in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. (''We didn't find out it was a ghetto until somebody told us it was a ghetto,'' he says.) His younger brother, Milfred, earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University and is now chairman of Africana Studies at Brooklyn College. ''What drove my brother and me was my mother and my father,'' Fierce says. His father, Millus, worked as a receiving clerk in the textile business, his mother in real estate sales. ''Daddy was steady and sturdy. He made the sun come up each day. It was Mama who said, 'The sun is going to be golden.' '' Fierce again made the rounds of New York banks in 1963. Now, he recalls, the times were changing: ''The buildup of civil rights activities began to question the conscience of America, particularly of American business.'' He received expressions of interest from several banks, but an interview with Chase's personnel director made his decision easy. ''You have to understand that my wife and I were living at my mother's house in Brooklyn,'' he says. ''I went to the Chase Manhattan Bank building and it was 60 stories high, a mass of glass and steel. I was tense, nervous, but when I went in to see the personnel director, he put his feet up on his desk. He said, 'Relax, don't get serious.' Then he spilled his coffee and cussed. I thought it was great. I thought, 'This is the place for me.' '' International banks, especially those in Asia, have downplayed their commercial banking because the Pacific Rim countries are awash in liquidity. Japan's Nomura Securities reports that borrowing by East Asian and Southeast Asian countries dropped 24 percent in 1986 and 65 percent in the first quarter of 1987. Another major spur to the expansion into activities other than lending has been the banks' woeful track record in Latin America, where they have been forced to write off billions of dollars in loans. ''As a result of that experience, banks have turned more and more to nontraditional banking enterprises that do not put the bank's assets at risk,'' says Robert F. Grealy, Chase's Asia-Pacific director of international relations. ''So we're talking about service, currency trading, merger and acquisition arrangements, where the bank performs a service and there's no risk. That's what banks would rather be doing.''

Full text: New York Times, Sep 25, 1988

forex trading system