26. Trade · Notable · Contested — excluded from counts
Prohibit Hong Kong clearinghouses as transit for U.S. capital
Printed page 789 26. Trade · from “The Case for Fair Trade”
“Prohibit the use of Hong Kong clearinghouses as transit points for American capital investing in the Chinese mainland.”
What has happened
- Not started
Nothing restricts the use of Hong Kong clearinghouses as a route for American capital into the Chinese mainland. Federal Register full text carries no document in any type since 2025-01-20 containing "Hong Kong clearinghouse" or "Hong Kong clearinghouses"; the 31 documents matching "clearinghouses" are Medicare, CFTC and SEC clearing-agency matters. The America First Investment Policy memorandum of 2025-02-21, which is the administration's China capital-markets policy, defines "foreign adversaries" to include Hong Kong but says nothing about clearing or settlement infrastructure. Nine Hong Kong bills were introduced in the 119th Congress - sanctions reviews, the HKETO Certification Act, judicial sanctions - and none concerns clearinghouses; all are in committee.
No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
This is the one item on printed page 789 that the America First Investment Policy memorandum does not reach even as an intention. The memorandum’s capital-markets section (2(l)) covers auditing standards, variable interest entity structures and pension fiduciary duty; its definition section brings Hong Kong and Macau inside “foreign adversaries” for the whole document, which is why the memorandum is worth reading here, but no clause addresses the transit of capital through Hong Kong clearing infrastructure.
Queries are recorded in the cluster negative search in docs/research/ch-26.md.
- Action
- restrict
- Object
- Hong Kong clearinghouses
- ID
- 2084