Jeff Lai- Data Visualization of HIBOR

"combined_rates_plot_sources"

Information

All of the code was generated using Gemini and Github Copilot Chat. This was a project I created out of an attempt to visualize the Hong Kong's interest settlement rates--the rate at which banks and financial institutions lend and borrow between one another within the Hong Kong market. This is used to maintain the linked exchange rate of the Hong Kong dollar (HKD) against the US dollar.

Motivation

I've recently been quite curious about Hong Kong's linked exchange rate, with the HKD pegged to the USD. When I found out that the exchange rate has been strictly managed within a range of 7.75–7.85 HKD per USD, I wanted to see periods where the Hong Kong Monetary Authority had to intervene to maintain the peg. After some further digging, I discovered the Hong Kong Inter-bank Offered Rate (HIBOR), a metric for the short-term interest rate for inter-bank lending in the Hong Kong.

I figured if I was able to visualize fluctuations of the HIBOR rate, I would be able to see certain periods where the interest rate increased to protect the peg, as well as the effectiveness of the HIBOR rate (visualized by the Histogram, KDE graph). An example of this would be the spike on my graph between 2005 and 2009, which was the consequences of the 1997 Asia Financial Crisis.

Challenges

Although I vibe-coded the entire thing, there were still some challenging things that I had to overcome. Firstly, it is my first time participating in a hackathon, and I had no idea what to expect on my work. After I found a project that I wanted to do, I was completely lost as to how I was going to be able to turn a .CSV file into a graph using Python. Ultimately I decided on using CPP to organize the data from the .CSV tables, and use Python libraries like matplotlib and pandas to create the graph.

End thoughts

I really enjoyed this experience, and it was unfortunate for me that I didn't do any programming. Now that I have an idea of what a week-long hackathon project feels and looks like, I'm looking forward to exploring how I'll use programming as a skillets to allow me to rely less on writing code with AI-prompts.