HONG KONG - HONG KONG'S government pledged on Sunday to do all it could to help the city's banks weather the credit crisis, but dismissed a report that it had put aside part of its Exchange Fund for that purpose.

'Our resilience is...stronger than many other places. Our foreign reserves are sufficient to stabilise Hong Kong's exchange rate,' Ms Julia Leung, Under Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, told local broadcaster RTHK.

'If necessary, we will use all our bullets to stabilise the financial industry,' she said, using a common Cantonese phrase for using all available resources.

But the government refuted a report in the Apple Daily, which said it has already set aside HK$500 billion (S$95.1billion) in assets from its Exchange Fund, which is used to back the local US-pegged currency.

'We will deploy the Hong Kong Exchange Fund to tackle the crisis if necessary - it is just common sense. But we have never fixed the amount,' said Mr Patrick Wong, a spokesman for Financial Secretary John Tsang.

The Exchange Fund, which stood at HK$1.4 trillion at the end of Aug, holds a variety of assets and is used by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to maintain the Hong Kong dollar's peg to the US dollar.

The authority, the city's de facto central bank, cut its key interest rate by 50 basis points last week, following similar moves by central banks across the world. -- AFP