VERY URGENT! You must clarify this for the safety of your bank deposits

URGENT, URGENT, URGENT! You must clarify this to check whether your bank deposits are guaranteed fully by the local government of Hong Kong:

Someone has told me that our bank deposits held in licensed banks like HSBC may not be guaranteed by the local government of Hong Kong IF you have a credit line with the bank and your deposits can be used to repay the credit.

Many bank depositors may not have borrowed any credit from their banks but if they have credit lines even standby credit lines with their banks, their bank deposits may not be covered by the guarantee of the local Hong Kong government.

In some cases, you may have absolutely no protection under the guarantee without even knowing it. Why? You might have obtained a credit line e.g. an OD line from your bank a long time ago but the bank can use your bank deposits to repay the OD. This credit line is available to you, though you don't need it or remember it! It may have been granted to you automatically when you have fixed time deposits with the bank or owing to your prime customer status in the bank. So if unfortunately your bank is trouble, the local government need not guarantee the return of your deposits even though you have not borrowed any credit or are entirely unaware of such long forgotten credit line with the bank!

Sounds very horrible, right? But please do check and clarify with your bank whether that is the correct position and if so, you must think seriously and carefully how you should protect your bank deposit.

I would like to have a standby credit line and I don't mind using my bank deposits to repay the credit if necessary. But if by doing so, I will lose protection under the local government's guarantee, I must seriously consider how to solve the problem.

Obviously, you can ask the bank to cancel the credit line but that does not appear to be normal to me. Why? The point about providing government guarantee is to enable the banks to conduct the business of lending but if everyone goes to his/her bank to cancel credit lines, then what's the point of doing banking? Yes, theoretically you can put your deposits in HSBC and then borrow credits from another bank. But that is entirely unrealistic! Why? Why should the lending bank provide the credit to you when you have no bank deposits to support the credit?

Anyway, this is NOT (yet) the time to discuss whether it is normal to give a guarantee like that! What is most urgent is that you must check and clarify the position with your bank to see whether or not your bank deposits are protected and if not or any risk of no protection, what you must do to protect your hard-earned money.

God, why have you forsaken us?