The region in itself provides a lot of important advantages:   labour markets amongst the Asiatic countries and of the EU member countries;    the possibilities of high return profit investments against capital, in real estate and infrastructure are huge and attractive for the developed markets;    the region has a population of higher than 20 million inhabitants sharing pleasant demographic characteristics;    the regional tourism is potentiality indispensable as a product of different climacteric combination to geographical features and various ethnical and cultural traditions. Preliminary results of empiric researches in the Bank of Albania show that the economic possibilities to exploit from regional countries are huge. Our analysis of external trade, based on gravity models, reveal that external trade of Albania with EU partners stays at optimum levels, while trade with the region is under its potentiality.   What does hamper our regional trade to achieve the potentiality?   What do we need to undertake coordinated structural reforms at regional level?   Are we encountering a weakening in coordinating the policies, information sharing, the establishment of institutions, the current legal infrastructure, or lobbing in European structures?   How much possible is the synchronisation of the efforts for more effective and efficient convergence and the integration process?   Which are the main economic and political fields where we may find larger space for the achievement of common regional polices?
So if somebody shorted the market thinking that the adjustment should be deeper, and if the market did fall and he benefited from the short position, we would even congratulate him for having excellent foresight. But we are against market manipulation, specifically the manipulation of our currency market, taking advantage of our passiveness under the discipline of the rule-based currency board arrangements, to produce very high interest rates with a view to sending the stock market into a nosedive and benefiting from a short position in stock index futures. Such manipulation was conducted with no regard to economic fundamentals. This presents serious risks of market dislocation or overshooting, with asset markets ratcheting down every time this double play is staged. This can be highly damaging to the stability of the whole financial system of Hong Kong. It also presents the serious risk of undermining general confidence in our currency. Our aim has been to deter market manipulation, not to jack up the market. The second accusation is that we panicked because the pain of adjustment with a fixed exchange rate, including the interest rate pain arising from capital outflow under the currency board arrangements, had become unbearable. We did not panic. We were trying to prevent the market panic and overshooting that those manipulating our markets were trying to engineer. And Hong Kong is prepared and well equipped to bear the inevitable pain of economic adjustment necessitated by the financial turmoil that originated in this region and is now spreading to the developed markets.