Bad weather, bad luck for HK?

Ben Kwok October 13, 2021 10:54

Typhoon Kompasu has forced classes the stock market to be suspended in Hong Kong. Photo: RTHK

Misfortune never comes singly. We had two rare typhoons soon after entering the final quarter of the year.

What made it special this time for Kompasu, currently at No.8 at the time of writing, was the record four-day short span before the last tropical cyclone.

Didn’t we just have the typhoon Lionrock, which basically suspended all the outside activities last weekend?

As expected, the Hong Kong Observatory was lamented for its poor ability to predict the impact of Lionrock, the farthest storm from Hong Kong in 60 years to trigger typhoon No.8, and hence the Observatory’s inconsistent messages that gave the wrong impression that Lionrock could be taken lightly.

But one's fortune can change in the blink of an eye, so is the weather, as the old Chinese saying goes.

As always when typhoon strikes, there were long queues at supermarkets on Monday and again Tuesday evening, clearing out their food section.

As an eye witness, I could testify I could not get even an orange in the Causeway Bay wet market even before Tuesday lunch time.

The odd weather might be pre-telling some odd things to come.

In the traditional vulnerable month for stocks, we saw a sharp stock rebound for Hang Seng Index – led by the ATM (Alibaba, Tencent and Meituan) – in the past three days but the momentum was somewhat curbed by Wall Street weakness.

Would odd weather affect the political climate? That has yet to be seen. In a positive note, we are glad to hear that Hong Kong’s first Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa is recovering after a successful operation at Queen Mary Hospital.

Also at Queen Mary Hospital is Chief Magistrate So Wai-tak. The designated national security judge is reported to have a heart problem (which is understandable given the mountain of work in handling the landmark case of former Apple Daily chairman Jimmy Lai and the 35+ primary election case of the pro-democracy camp).
In another shocking development in the legal circle, Judge Sham Siu-man, famously known for acquitting a dozen protesters, has reportedly applied for early retirement and will be leaving Hong Kong for Britain.

According to the Times, Sham could be the first Hong Kong judge to leave Hong Kong since the national security law came into effect in the middle of last year.

Whatever their political beliefs are, we wish them a smooth sailing ahead. But odd things did happen in October!

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Ben Kwok

EJ Insight writer

Hong Kong

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