When Michael Milken, pioneer of the 1980s junk bond market, held the first Asia-based conference of the Milken Institute last month, he decided to do it in Singapore – where he had established a branch of his think-tank a year earlier.
The choice of the Asian city state was striking. Hong Kong might have been a more obvious location, given its proximity to China, the world’s second-biggest economy and home to a financial centre that is the gateway in and out of the country’s rapidly maturing capital market.
But Mr Milken says that many of the institute’s “stakeholders and partners” – banks, insurance companies, private equity groups, asset managers and institutional investors – already had senior executives for Asia based in Singapore.