Big Lychee, Various Sectors

“This is the last time anyone will try to do this…” If Mitt Romney wins the election today, he will be the last US president imposed on the rest of the population by white males. From this point onwards, a candidate who fails to get the support of at least a reasonable segment or two of the country’s women/non-white/non-Anglo voters loses, assuming a two-way race.

Mitt’s Mormonism didn’t become an issue. All fair-minded people will of course welcome this, but as a lover of entertainment I have to say: disappointed! Spoilsport evangelical preacher Billy Graham recently removed the Latter Day Saints from his list of cults and said all that matters is a candidate’s position on “the sanctity of marriage as between one man and one woman; the sanctity of life; and yes, the protection of God’s beloved nation Israel.”

All religions must be started by charlatans or lunatics, but the relative newness of Mormonism accentuates its ‘fakeness’ and apparent strangeness. It would have been relatively easy for fundamentalist detractors (secretly funded in my fantasy by Obama sympathizers) to skewer Romney theologically as non-Christian. However, the theoretical ‘weirdness’ of Mormonism is counterbalanced by what it produces in practice: almost absurdly clean, hard-working, law-abiding, educated people who are more American than most other Americans. Only the radical atheists are creeped out by the sub-Mohammedan back story and the special relationship between Jesus and Missouri, and for all we know, under a Romney administration the famous LDS underwear will catch on among Baptists and Presbyterians.

Not much else would hugely change, despite all the clash of values and visions in the debates and ads. Mitt has been a bit of closet liberal at times, and it’s not like circumstances leave the nation’s leader with a lot of choices. That probably goes for the China/Asian security front as well.

My hunch is that we will not find out. A 10.00am glance at Google News suggests that Obama sympathizers are tentatively forecasting victory, while Romney-ites are saying it’s too close to call. With a lot of early voting over the weeks, and a last-minute play of the Bruce Springsteen card, it suggests a clear win for Obama in the Electoral College. If so, the Tea Party types, hyper-conservatives and crypto-racists will be even angrier than four years ago. The Kenyan socialist got back in, and the demographics will never be the same again.

 Good news…

…for students of the curious quasi-legalized illegal parking phenomenon in Central and other crowded spots: I spied a traffic cop giving a ticket to one of those big lumpy black vans, and then walk a few yards off to do a same to another one. This is a rare sight.

I have been told that the cops and traffic wardens largely tolerate illegal parking by private cars because, if not stationary, the drivers will simply go round and round in circuits waiting for their ultra-important bosses to emerge from whatever buildings they are in – and the traffic jams would be even worse. In a lot of cities, the trend is towards actively managing traffic by charging a hefty toll to enter urban areas or simply blocking streets off so vehicles just can’t go there. In Hong Kong, the traffic manages the city; whatever it wants to do, we all have to go along with.

In the next photo I hope to take from the walkway over Connaught Road, the cop drags the driver out of the car and pistol-whips the guy into the path of an oncoming 20-ton truck.

A tie: that’s the outcome judging from page 5 of today’s Standard. Protesters look set to fail in their attempt to preserve Lung Mei, a rocky, no doubt foul-smelling and slimy patch of shoreline crawling with loathsome invertebrate life-forms. This follows a government announcement that it would press ahead with its ‘win-win solution to promote community development’ thing, otherwise known as an artificial beach.

The Standard’s report ends with a quote from an Executive Council member who also a vice-chairman of the New Territories lobby/mafia the Heung Yee Kuk, saying that his ownership of nearby land has ‘little’ to do with his support for the project. Equally convincingly, the government’s statement stresses extensive public consultation involving interminable ‘various sectors’, which apparently took place some time back in the last decade.

The opponents’ main concern has been for the local wildlife, but much of this was removed over the weekend by curious members of the public, who took it home, where, the South China Morning Post says, it died. So the only remaining argument against the artificial beach is the one about heavy metals and sewage, which is surely a matter for individual swimmers in the Tai Po neighbourhood to worry about.

There is one other argument, namely ‘just leave it alone’: stop knocking stuff down and changing everything just for the hell of it. And this is where public opinion might have scored a victory by rescuing the West Wing of the old government headquarters in Central. Officials could, the Standard’s anonymous source says, be swayed by popular opposition to the plan to redevelop.

Campaigners to protect what they labeled Ye Olde Authentick Government Hill emphasized the architectural wonders of the block. Those of us less gifted with the insight to see Venice or the Forbidden City in a 1960s concrete cube worried more about the sheer pain in the ass of more mindless construction in our crowded downtown. (The word ‘mindless’ is, if anything, an understatement: bureaucrats’ original vision was for a huge tower full of shopping malls and car parks.)

Assuming that the newspaper wouldn’t print the story unless the ‘source’ were Chief Secretary Carrie Lam or some other responsible adult of similar standing, this raises a tantalizing possibility. With the old complex destined to remain intact, the civil servants will now be able to evacuate the grotesque Government Palace at Tamar and go back to their suitably modest and low-profile old home. The upheaval can be presented as part of the unraveling of ex-Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s sins and disastrous errors while in office – proof of his successor CY Leung’s people-first credentials. Tamar can then be rented out to those companies forever whining about the shortage of office space in Central, or blown up in one of those really fun controlled explosions.

The Franklin Lam Property-Sale Mega-Scandal degenerates into a mess of confusing, complicated and – most unforgivably of all – tedious detail.

The bottom line… Did the Executive Council member have inside knowledge of government measures to cool apartment prices when he decided to sell several units in Caine Road’s Casa Bella tower? No.

That should be all we need to know. But some theatrical pro-democrats are reporting him to the Independent Commission Against Corruption anyway, and calling for him to leave Exco. Meanwhile, Chief Executive CY Leung’s other foes are making their own meal out of it.

Beijing’s local liaison office has openly encouraged an array of loyalist but anti-CY forces to support the new CE, even though they had backed tycoon Henry Tang for the job. But that doesn’t stop the March quasi-election losers leaping on every opportunity to damage him by proxy, and Lam represents the third (fourth? fifth?) of Leung’s hapless sidekicks to serve the purpose.

The ‘Mary Ma’ column in the Standard – owned by tycoon and major Henry Tang fan Charles Ho – lays out the plan of attack. So far as I can be bothered to follow the excruciating detail, it seems Lam’s supposed wrongdoing was setting a minimum price for the sale, and letting the agent keep any extra he could make from the buyer. I’ve never sold multiple units in one block, but I suppose it’s a way to incentivize, speed things up and improve your chances of getting a particular price. Inevitably, we have to have some extra confusion: whether the surplus money would go to charity (as if we care – and let’s not even stop to wonder whether real-estate agencies have their own grudges against the Leung administration). And even more inevitably, additional misunderstandings arise and are – of course – due to Lam’s wife. God forbid we ever have one of these scandals where it’s not the wife’s fault.

At which point, many right-thinking people will lose patience and suggest that we get every journalist, every legislator and every Exco member, put them all up against a wall – with their spouses – and shoot the lot. Apparently, we can’t do that, so we have to ask: what the hell has Lam actually done wrong?

The Standard’s front-page story suggests that the minimum-price arrangement could be illegal if the buyer isn’t informed. There is a vague parallel in stockbroking: naughty brokers can delay executing a trade in order to get a better price than the client asked for – and pocket the difference. In a morally perfect world, intermediaries would work solely and selflessly in the interests of clients (though how a property agent can do what is best for both buyer and seller, I’ve no idea). Lam’s sin would be inducing the agent to extract a higher price from the buyer than Lam was willing to accept. Maybe there’s a law against it, but the last I checked, Lam has not been arrested.

Bear in mind here that the anti-CY forces stirring all this up are fundamentally our own lovely and honest property developers, who know a thing or two about aggressively pricing apartments.

A closely related, almost subsidiary, group of people who hate CY are the bureaucrats, best symbolized by former CE Donald Tsang. Sir Bow-Tie’s close friend and sympathizer Albert Cheng, who also blames CY for the death of his digital radio enterprise, presents his take on the Franklin Lam saga in the South China Morning Post. It is mostly what you would expect, but toward the end ‘Taipan’ goes from innuendo to conspiracy theory…

Leung only pays lip service to the aspirations of the people to crack down on property prices, but deep down he wants to build a close network of property elites and a power base that comprises mainland property tycoons to replace the local ones.

This idea is widely believed among pro-democrats, especially radicals; they see the proposed Northeast New Territories development as a gift to mainland developers. There are two possible explanations for the theory. One is that it’s true. Weirder things have happened, and it would be in keeping with a sweep of history in which the local tycoons, having played their part for Beijing from the 1980s to the present, can now be dispensed with. No-one escapes Mainlandization. (And it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys.)

Another explanation is our old friend cognitive dissonance. Opponents struggle to explain how the new Chief Executive, a ‘bad guy’, hates and is hated by the property tycoons, another bunch of ‘bad guys’. How do you get your head around that? There’s only one way to make sense of it: he must have another bunch of property tycoons stashed away somewhere.

The weekend starts now.

…over the septic tank.

As soon as Hong Kong’s government unveiled its new stamp duties on property, expatriates who were not permanent residents started complaining that the 15% ‘Locust Levy’ would stop them from buying an apartment here. That anyone – least of all people with relatively fresh memories of less insane overseas housing markets – was planning on buying at current prices was a bit of a shock. But there it was: they felt victimized, and clearly envied those of us still entitled to pay HK$11,000 a square foot for a little concrete box in a distant cramped estate with a silly name.

Now the tables are turned. Expatriates (with or without full residency) are allowed to reserve places in the English Schools Foundation network for their children by paying HK$500,000 for a debenture. Locals – anyone who can’t produce a foreign passport – have lower priority, and they are seething at the injustice of it.

Just as expats demand the privilege of buying a grotesquely overpriced apartment, the Hong Kong Chinese insist on the right to give their children the lame, homework-lite, project-based, teamwork-oriented, namby-pamby education that puts Western countries so far behind Asian ones in international rankings. Rather than give their kids the rigorous, exam-based, ultra-competitive, high-pressure, results-focused schooling that has them doing calculus by age 10, they would prefer the liberal environment of the gwailo school, where the kids’ finger-paintings aren’t graded lest it hurts the losers’ self-esteem, the guitar is considered a musical instrument, and it’s cool to get drunk and stoned and put the video on YouTube.

On the subject of covetousness, a rash of red-eye disease breaks out whenever the government appoints a new gaggle of fresh-faced and other semi-misfits as Deputy Assistant Sub-Undersecretaries and, even worse, Political Assistants, as happened yesterday. The reason is simple: the Political Assistants get HK$98,700 a month (because HK$100,000 would look like too much), and the Under Secretaries’ pay is so great I can’t cram it all in here.

But hold that jealousy. These jobs are less desirable than you would imagine. First, these people are disposable and may not be around for more than a few years. Second, the job will not be much fun. There are grumbles that they are duplicating civil servants’ roles, and it is true that the Under Secretary awkwardly shares her bureau’s number-two slot with a non-fireable civil servant Permanent Secretary who is an expert on everything. But political appointees are now supposed to do things the bureaucrats are increasingly reluctant to do.

Much of this involves arguing the government’s case before the media. Civil servants have increasingly shied away from this for the understandable reasons that the policies they have had to defend have been dire and people recognize them in the street and laugh. The really nasty bit is appearing before and lobbying members of the Legislative Council. Dragging Liberal Party tycoon-legislators out of bed at 1.00am to get a budget passed is the least of it; going 10 rounds before a Legco committee with a belligerent radical lawmaker bringing down the full might of People Power upon you, all live on TV, is, by all accounts, harrowing.

They won’t have a nice time. Fortunately, many of these new political appointees are ex-journalists. As we all know, and have seen so vividly in the past, former reporters have a near-magical ability to make even the cruddiest, stupidest and most malevolent policies appear wonderful and become instantly popular across the community.

Is no-one ever satisfied? As Headline of the Week in today’s Standard makes clear, even microscopic infectious agents are complaining…

With so many injustices, scandals and horrors to rant about, do Hong Kong’s pro-democracy legislators have room to squeeze in one more? If not, the mini-uproar over Executive Council member Franklin Lam may prove short-lived unless they ease up on some of their myriad other causes.

Like Leung Chun-ying, whom he supported for Chief Executive long before it became wise/briefly fashionable/compulsory, Lam made his zillions out of the Big Lychee’s rigged and warped real-estate market. But, also like CY, he is not part of the developers’ cabal. As a banker who specialized in equities analysis, he and his investor clients profited through his understanding of a twisted and damaging system that was not of his making. Trendy ‘ethical’ investment purists might think that hypocritical; the rest of us can only acknowledge the success represented by a portfolio of 25 properties.

As that declaration of interests shows in a hastily scribbled-in amendment, that number was until recently 27. The allegation is that he recently sold a couple of apartments to dodge the impact of the new stamp duty regime on property transactions. The timing tells you he wouldn’t have known about the new measures. So do the facts that he left 25 unsold, and that he sits on ExCo and declares interests – assuming that he is not a total idiot.

Essentially retired, Lam’s main hobby before ExCo was his sort-of think-tank, HKGolden50, introduced and examined exquisitely here. Although he profited from ex-CE Donald Tsang’s deranged pro-developer/anti-people/anti-economy land strategy, Lam happily proposes the opposite approach: provide more space.

Specifically, he suggests big expansions in residential, commercial and other capacity in areas like Tung Chung. His mistake, in my humble opinion, is to assume that the Mainland influx is a permanent phenomenon that we must build to accommodate. My hunch is that the crush of ‘locusts’ will ease off when the Chinese government sorts out milk powder supplies and high luxury goods taxes, and the arbitrage effect vanishes (as arbitrage opportunities usually do). And while we’re waiting for that to happen, a ration of one visit per three months for Shenzhen-ites, as a Mainland anti-smuggling measure, will do the trick.

On the subject of milk powder, pro-democrats in search of a more worthwhile target than Lam may be interested to know that a fight is brewing between the government and manufacturers of infant formula. Hong Kong has traditionally not heavily regulated quasi-medical industries like cosmetics/beauty and baby food, but this is now changing. Although ‘consumer protection’ can go to counter-productive lengths (and notwithstanding, also, the breast-feeding lobby’s occasional rhetorical excesses), the administration’s proposed code looks largely sensible; some might say it should go further.

The real scumbags here – and there comes a point where you really do wonder how low people will stoop to make a living – are the marketing and advertising creeps. Promotional materials for formula unashamedly suggest, in essence, that their brand is better than anything from Gerber, Nestle or mammary glands, because drinking it will guarantee that your kid’s IQ doubles and he or she will become a high-flying lawyer with a PhD from Harvard and a Nobel prize for piano-playing, by age 10.

Our officials want the ads to be ‘scientific and factual’. It’s all here. The industry is of course as outraged as a property developer having to give an accurate apartment size. The pro-dems, mindful of that thing about my enemy’s enemy, will presumably rave about something else.

Everyone, it seems, hates the Hong Kong government’s new property stamp duty measures. Developers and their shareholders can’t be happy: their stock slid 4 or 5% yesterday. The spiky haired real estate agents, whose vast numbers are one of the main symptoms of the city’s real-estate disease, must be even more morose than usual if their commissions correlate at all with the share price of Midland Realty, down 14% or so.

The Big Lychee’s Anglophone economics sages come up with every objection imaginable – practical, technical, theoretical, moral and ideological. It can’t work, won’t work, shouldn’t work and maybe even mustn’t work, given the Hong Kong bureaucracy’s dismal record. (The South China Morning Post‘s are here and here, and this one’s free.)

Others are irate because they think the measures will indeed have an impact, and one they have bet big against. The humungous Hong Kong property thread on the AsiaXpat forum hosts several gung-ho real-estate bulls who are clearly incensed that the CY Leung administration is threatening the continued easy capital gains they felt were their due. One warns that the developers will want CY’s head (they have in fact hated him for years) and issues dire threats that government income from land sales and property transaction taxes will fall. Funny how people who have too many eggs in the real-estate basket can suddenly acquire a deep concern about government revenues.

The Standard finds an angry expat called William, who is angry that, having lived here since just 2009 (“Up to last week I believed I was from Hong Kong…”), he will have to stump up an extra 15% non-res stamp duty. He is being delivered from sinking his young family’s savings into the planet’s worst-value-for-money housing and should be grateful. (He calls this city ‘exciting for engineers’; a quick Google search suggests he may not be totally uninvolved with corporate white locusts Ove Arup, a construction company hurling your and my money down the toilet by building the Sir Donald Tsang Zhuhai/Macau Mega-Bridge. At least he styles himself ‘Mr’ not the ridiculous ‘Ir’. And tidy that apartment up.)

So absolutely everyone’s miffed?

Not at all. Reports on reaction in the Mainland vary. Some chatterers seem to resent yet another symbol of Hong Kong’s exceptionalism, while others are envious and wish their native Shanghai or Beijing could do something similar. (From a pan-China perspective, Hong Kong operates an extreme version of the hukou system that benefits selfish urban dwellers by binding migrant workers’ residency and welfare rights to native villages – a discriminatory method of exclusion deplored by folks like Amnesty International.)

And then there is the tiny matter of the Hong Kong people themselves. The ones I’ve talked to love the new stamp duties. It’s as if CY had walked up to them and given them a hug to let them know they weren’t forgotten. Whether it brings down prices in theory but not in practice, or in practice but not in theory, they’re happy. They mostly realize that policy options are limited; an immovable currency peg is being hit by an unstoppable flood of hot and often dirty money, making the city Asia’s second biggest recipient of offshore direct investment. What can you do? This is politics not economics (bar a dash of psychology to try to deflate a bubble to keep it what officials call ‘healthy’ – that is, keeping their personal portfolios in positive equity). So you go for something rough-and-ready, something populist, something that pisses off all the right interest groups, with a hint of more to come. If the people like it, it worked.

Following the recent dry spell, Hong Kong has become warmer but not really hot; the air is suddenly humid, and the sky is grey and drizzling. Spring has arrived! And with it, a cascade of exciting news.

The government has introduced new stamp duties on residential property. The idea is to curb speculation by Mainlanders laundering dirty money and by others seeking a store of value in the face of global inflationary monetary policy. According to a quote in the South China Morning Post, this will kill real estate agents, and for this alone, it surely deserves our full support.

One objection is that expatriates who have not quite qualified for permanent residency here will be lumped in with Premier Wen Jiabao’s family and other folk from over the border carrying suitcases of cash. But if honest, taxpaying new arrivals decide not to buy at today’s idiotic prices, they will surely drop to their knees in thanks to Financial Secretary John Tsang when the inanity of HK$10,000 a square foot for a concrete box in Tseung Kwan O reaches its inevitable denouement.

Another objection is that the herd will now pile into industrial and commercial real estate. This raises the intriguing question of to what extent investing in Hong Kong property is a psychiatric disorder, or at least a pathological collapse of the imagination. You can put your wealth into stocks, bonds, commodities, precious metals, farmland, futures, with long and short variants, from across an entire planet. But for grim-faced masochists petrified of losing a few percent of their millions to inflation, the only possible asset is concrete boxes in one city in East Asia. The upside is outweighed by the downside, the transaction costs were onerous even before the government’s new stamp duties, the paperwork is tedious, and at the end of the day you have the burdens of ownership, like fixing leaky plumbing and collecting rent. The only attraction is cheap financing – which implies leveraging, which raises the possibility of bankruptcy. Some people deserve to be wiped out.

What will an amphibious and airborne assault by the People’s Liberation Army do to the Centa-City Index? CCTV carried a report last week that the PLA Hong Kong garrison held an exercise in which they fought a ‘Cantonese-speaking’ ‘blue’ enemy army. The full hilarity is here. The war game was itself a make-believe one performed for the benefit of the cameras. With no Cantonese-speaking nation or military force in existence, the message is clear: the PLA is prepared to crush an uprising of Hong Kong pro-independence freedom fighters.

The freedom fighters themselves denied yesterday that they were pro-independence. And, in his tellingly inverted-comma-smothered manner, even the true patriot (translated from Ta Kung Pao) must admit that…

Different from “Taiwan independence” as well as “Tibet independence” and “Xinjiang independence” on the mainland, the “Hong Kong independence” movement has remained hidden from public view.

As things that don’t exist tend to be. (You’d have thought they had enough independence – sorry, “independence” – movements to worry about as it is.)

Was the PLA anti-Canto war games story aimed at the Hong Kong audience as a warning, or at the Mainland public as a reassurance, or at some part of the Beijing power structure, maybe to counter some sort of criticism? Assuming it was aimed right here, at the uppity, flag-waving, anti-locust city-state enthusiasts, we can only wonder at the complete disconnection between Beijing and Sheung Shui. The Cantonese enemy forces are a bunch of kids who are pissed off because their city’s quality of life is being damaged by an excessive influx of visitors and a sharp rise in housing costs, and have discovered a revanchist symbolism that touches a nerve. The military, the Party-controlled media and the Beijing officials monitoring Hong Kong claim to see a genuinely separatist impulse, all the better a reason to tighten the screws on the Big Lychee – which will provoke yet more of the very behaviour and sentiment they say they want to eradicate. It would be side-splitting if it weren’t ultimately unfunny. John Tsang, in his own muddled little way trying to do something about housing, is a light in the darkness.

The South China Morning Post is especially weighty today – at least in my neighbourhood. First, there is the glossy wraparound, which is pretty much daily now. Today’s is for a ‘desirably Swiss’ women’s shoe no less visually and aesthetically repulsive than a medieval torture instrument or a close-up shot of a cockroach orifice. Second, there is a ‘must-read magazine for the metropolitan male’ inserted within the paper itself. It is a third of an inch thick and weighs around three times as much as the newspaper proper, which explains why the waste bins alongside the Mid-Levels Escalator are crammed with the thing.

Clearly no-one has actually opened this absurd waste of someone’s money; being publicly spirited, I can’t help perusing its contents in case they might be of interest to future archaeologists seeking to know what happened to this civilization.

It has lame articles (judging from the first sentence of one of them) urging the commercial feminization of men through such activities as the facial-spa-rubbing-stuff-into-skin thing. With a large portion of the female population now apparently hooked on pricy, gimmicky lotions marketed with obviously fraudulent claims, the manufacturers are now coming for the guys. Will it work? And if so, where does it stop? Men’s lip gloss? Eyeliner? Bras?

(If only for the sake of those who have to look at us, we should try to keep a youthful face. It is easy and cheap: avoid ultraviolet rays (too much sunlight), and wash using just warm water, not oils-destroying soap. And eat lots of fresh fruit and veg.)

The ‘must-read magazine’ inevitably turns to tacky watches, sports cars and a ‘luxury machine’ belt clasp. Suspecting the latter is a joke sneaked in by a rebellious SCMP staffer, I must check: it indeed exists and works thus. I am trying to think of a more futile application of metalworking technology since the dawn of the Bronze Age. A ‘Vote Henry Tang’ tie-pin perhaps. One of the watches is in all seriousness called the ‘Patrimony Traditionelle 14-day Tourbillon’ and costs a lucky-sounding HK$2.38 million. Is there anyone out there who finds it impressive? I feel so sorry for the product development manager’s parents – he could have been a traffic warden or something socially useful.

After pages of ancient, tradition-preserving, famous luxury brands you’ve never heard of (fancy a Wellendorf, anyone?), we get to perhaps the most fascinating and bizarre part of this ‘must-read’ bundle of consumerist inanity: the pictures of simpering, sexually deviant, mildly retarded people wearing ugly clothes in strange places.

And off to the landfill it goes. Why the SCMP produces this stuff is no secret: they need to eat, and if you have to stoop to the depths of the Tatler, so be it. But how did the sales people manage to con these luxury brands companies into stumping up hard cash for yet more of their tawdry advertising, knowing – I bet – that 99% of readers would toss it straight into the trash, unopened? That takes a rare skill, and I am sure SCMP editorial folk mindful of where their salaries come from join me in being full of admiration and wonder.

The Standard, being free and down-market, leads with retiring Justice Kemal Bokhary’s valedictory warning about former Justice Secretary Elsie Leung’s comments that Hong Kong’s judges don’t understand the city’s relationship with the Mainland. Poor old Elsie is also under attack from the Legislative Council for her remarks. Even the SCMP felt sufficiently alarmed to intone that the old girl ‘may have been unwise’. But it is worth repeating: in a one-party state with no ultimate separation of powers, no independent judiciary (or legislature) may exist, hence the loopholes in our constitution allowing Beijing to overrule our courts and rig the legislature. (This ultimate non-existence should also go for freedom of the media – leading to an anomaly in Hong Kong that must worry the Communist Party in principle.)

Elsie supports a one-party state, and her comments are perfectly logical and consistent. The hypocrites are the moderate pro-Beijing people who defend the rule of law vigorously; unless they are in denial, they must secretly either not be pro-Beijing, or not be pro-rule of law.

It is a bit like Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, the latest Republican to utter horribly embarrassing and inhumane comments about how raped women must not be allowed abortions. He essentially believes that God monitors rapes in progress and, upon completion, pushes one of two buttons marked ‘impregnate’ and ‘do not impregnate’ as per His Plan for all involved. He also believes life is sacred. Hence his unwavering position – perfectly logical and consistent. It is the Mitt Romneys, blathering about being pro-life but OK with abortion in cases of rape and incest, who are kidding themselves and everyone else. Either believe that something evil/crazy is good/normal, or don’t; you can’t pick and choose.

As the property and stock markets show, Hong Kong is on the receiving end of a wave of hot money. The inflow is mostly due to quantitative easing in the big, debt-crippled economies, possibly augmented, some think, by Japanese capital fleeing the hostile Mainland. And the Yuan is strengthening against the dollar, pushing up prices of food imported from over the border, and increasing incentives for Shenzhen residents to come over and hoover up everything on the shelves in Sheung Shui stores.

If Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve from 1987-2006 was too stupid to see or do anything about his mega-bubble, what hope is there for Hong Kong, where our leaders are hardly more competent, and anyway have given the Fed control of our monetary policy? The pressure rises another notch. Even more, the poor find the cost of essentials rising, the lower middle class battle for space and goods with Mainlanders, and the bourgeois see their dream of home ownership slipping away. A few people will do well out of this (if they are not too greedy or unlucky with timing), but, to quote Craig Stephen, “…too many people are unable to join the liquidity party. Much depends on whether Hong Kong’s unelected leaders are prepared to govern for more than just the top 1%.”

The potential for serious crisis (say, at least 2003-scale) is that much greater. Meanwhile, Chief Executive CY Leung and his team seem overwhelmed. In their desperation to announce additional home-building capacity, they have proposed scrapping the Kai Tak sports stadium white elephant, backtracked in the face of vested interests, and now started muttering about increasing residential area at the South West Kowloon cultural hub. As if the 250,000 empty apartments in town don’t exist. As if there isn’t a grossly distorted market, leading to property prices that make fair economic value a fiction.

Is CY going to unleash a flood of new housing stock at just the wrong time, as he did in the late 1990s when then-CE Tung Chee-hwa followed his advice to build 85,000 units a year? Or is he just pretending he will do so, in the hope that the bubble naturally deflates in some way in the meantime? (Does he, or anyone, fully grasp all the long-term implications and contradictions here? For example, the non-landed middle class want housing to be cheaper so they can afford to buy – on the understanding that prices will subsequently double or treble in value again.)

And what about the affordability of food for the poor? (If speculators start hoarding rice, will CY respect their property rights and leave them alone as well?) And what about the Mainland tourists and traders swamping the trains, streets and shops?

Some people have plentiful disposable income, own their home and don’t live in areas teeming with tourists. But they too are coming along with another problem for CY and his team. They are starting to notice that the Mandatory Provident Fund is the anti-matter of savings schemes. It’s supposed to give you more than you would otherwise have for retirement – it actually gives you less. Columnist Jake van der Kamp discussed it yesterday, while two South China Morning Post readers give us the benefit of their opinions about this fraud/theft/not-merely-legal-but-compulsory mugging… 

The good news for CY is that Hong Kong’s opposition pro-democrats, who could be triggering rebellion and revolution in this climate if they felt minded to do so, are instead fighting to get welfare for billionaire tycoons like Li Ka-shing. Even so, it must be getting pretty hot in the government kitchen.