Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

recent posts

Archives

Categories

  • The ‘weak’ dollar

    After Shaky before Christmas, now Simon is complaining about the weakness of the Dollar (both US and Hong Kong because of the currency peg). Whilst it will probably be quite good for Hong Kong overall, the timing is all wrong (as a direct result of the peg) – we wanted a weak dollar 5-6 years ago, not now! On the other hand, the normal effect of a weaker currency (increasing inflation) is no bad thing when you have deflation.

    Actually, what interests me is the terminology – a “weak” dollar sounds like a bad thing, but actually the effects are more complex – good for some, and bad for others.

    Similarly, there used to be a tendency to describe inflation as bad, though now we have had several years of very low inflation in many countries and deflation in a few (notably Japan and Hong Kong) this is perhaps less common. Inflation is certainly bad for people on fixed incomes (particularly pensioners) but it is good if you own property that increases in price. Defaltion and very low inflation mean that companies have to introduce pay freezes or cuts rather than being able to give increases that are below the rate of inflation to achieve the same effect.

    The general feeling is that high interest rates are a bad thing, but that’s not true if you have savings and are earning interest (pensioners again).

    Higher share prices are also seen as a good thing, but clearly for every buyer there must be a seller, and presumably each is satisfied with the price at which the deal was struck. If I sell shares and then the price goes up, I have lost some potential profit, whereas low share prices create an opportunity to buy and make a profit if prices then increase. In simple terms, if I’m a buyer I want low prices, if I’m a seller I want high prices.

    Perhaps the idea that high share prices are good comes from the company perspective, and certainly if the market is depressed then it is difficult to raise money, but that may make it more attractive to issue bonds or simply borrow from the bank. If a company issues shares and they then go up in value by 50%, shouldn’t they have issued them at a higher price in order to raise more money?

    High property prices are also usually seen as good, but again that’s not really true if you are a buyer (though in fact if prices are rising people are usually more keen to buy because they imagine that the trend will continue, but really this is not logical).

    I’m sure there are plenty of other examples of this!

  • More weird things about Hong Kong TV

    Still no sign of Now Broadband TV where I live, but what I read today makes me less keen on having this service. Apparently it is not possible to record any of the programs, which means that you have to watch them live or not at all (this is from Dan Gillmor‘s column in the SCMP, which I can’t find online). This is weird when you consider that in the UK the satellite operator BSkyB is moving in the opposite direction by offering customers a service whereby all programs can be recorded on a special box and watched at any time. PCCW say that they imposed this restriction at the insistence of the channel providers, and it may change in the future. I hope so!

    Meanwhile, Cable TV say that they will complete their switchover to digital by May of this year. As we still have analogue here that means we will be one of the last places in Hong Kong to be switched over, which I find somewhat amazing. This is a large, modern, estate, not a tiny place in the back of beyond! I believe there a number of channels that are only available on digital, so I hope they get on with it. It should also improve the picture quality, which is quite poor for BBC World and some other channels.

    The problem in Hong Kong for both these companies is getting access to buildings, which seems to depend upon the attitude of the management company. So Galaxy will launch their satellite TV service next month but it will not be very widely available. Unlike many other countries, where home-owners can simply attach a dish to the wall of their house, virtually everyone in Hong Kong has to rely on getting these services through a central dish. This has one small advantage, which is that Star World and its sister channels are available in most buildings at no additional charge, but overall it can be very inconvenient.

  • What price perfection?

    Interesting piece in the Gweilo Diaries, referring to an article in the FT. Hemlock says that he “hates excellence” and that “good enough is perfect”. I’m afraid that the phrase “good enough” is one that I tend to use about a piece of work (done by someone else) when I have given up hope of it being improved and have to accept what has been done. Very much a case of damning with faint praise. However, I do agree that perfection is usually not possible, and that it is very easy to waste time in the vain hope of making something perfect.

    (more…)

  • Everyday frustrations

    Living in Hong Kong and dealing with organizations based overseas can be very frustrating. For example, try filling in registration forms on the Internet. For one thing, they usually insist on a Zip or Post Code even though not every country has them. What’s worse is that they sometimes use this information later to find your records, so I have to guess what I entered (normally "NT" or ‘-"). Makes sense in most countries because people will know their own postcode or zipcode, but not in Hong Kong and a few other places.

    Then I wanted my bank in the UK to transfer some money to my Hong Kong bank account. In the past they have done this with no problem based on a letter from me, but not this time. Each time they came up with a problem or needed more information I had to post a letter to them, which took about a week to arrive. Phones, fax and email are apparently not sufficiently secure.

    First they wanted to know the address of the branch (in Hong Kong) where I bank, and didn’t seem at all convinced when I told them that all international transfers go through the main branch in Central. It’s always been this way as far as I know, and UK banks must transfer money to Hong Kong fairly regularly.

    They also expect the branch to have a "sort code", which in the UK identifies the bank and branch, but which is not used in Hong Kong – the account number is unique for the bank, across all branches. That’s the advantage of Hong Kong being a relatively small place, but this confused the clerk in London who expected things to be the same as the UK.

    Then they complained because my signature had changed compared to the one in their records. They invited me to go to my nearest branch and give them a new sample of my signature, but obviously that wasn’t very practical. My suggestion that perhaps they could look at my signature on recent letters or cheques didn’t seem to go down very well. I can’t remember how this got resolved – perhaps I just shouted at the guy and told him to stop being stupid.

    So they finally passed the transfer request to their "international section" but couldn’t guarantee that they would be willing to transfer my money to my account in Hong Kong. They phoned me up a few days later and asked me a few questions – no, not general knowledge but about me. The problem came when they asked me for the name of my employer, because I had no idea when they had last updated their records. I guessed and got it wrong, and the lady seemed quite disappointed. However, after I had gone through my employment history she seemed satisfied (it turned out that their records were updated in 1996 or 1997). And they finally sent me the money.

    No common sense, banks. A long time ago, I opened a savings account with a bank in Guernsey (Channel Islands) because the interest rate was high. I stopped using the account about ten years ago, but they have been sending me statements ever since, showing my credit balance of 67p (HK$5). Then a few months ago they wrote to me to say that as part of the attempts to prevent money laundering they needed to check my identity. Needless to say, I wrote to them suggesting that the best thing to do would be close the account, and that I was amazed they hadn’t suggested it. I don’t like to think how much it has cost them in postage and administration to look after this trifling sum on my behalf!

  • Some things I hate about PCs

    I have a theory about the humble PC, which is that it is still caught somewhere between being a toy for geeks and a consumer device. I speak as someone who has no wish to understand any more than is strictly necessary about operating system (or at least the ones that people won’t pay me to understand), and would like computers to “just ******* work”.

    (more…)

  • Airline food’s not kosher

    Via Simon, a bit of a diatribe about Emirates not offering a kosher menu. They don’t seem to make any secret of this fact, listing the various special meals that are available. So travel agents and anyone else should easily be able to find out what is available. Bruce is indignant that his request for a kosher meal was converted into a request for a vegetarian meal, even though it appears that this is in fact kosher food, but just not labelled as such!

    And people wonder why the problems in the Middle East are so difficult to solve.

    What I find slightly surprising about this is the suggestion that airlines have an obligation to provide special meals. I had always assumed that they indulged their passengers in this way because it was good for business. Most food on most airlines is fairly horrible anyway, and budget airlines in Europe simply don’t provide any free food or drink (but sometimes have drinks and snacks for sale). During the SARS outbreak, Cathay started serving sandwiches instead, and I believe they have now made that permanent on shorter flights (e.g. Hong Kong to Manila or Taipei).

    If I take a 4 hour train journey no food will be provided (except perhaps in First Class), so why do we expect a meal on a flight of a similar duration? Wouldn’t it make more sense for people to eat at the airport before leaving? Then they could exactly what they want to eat, and wouldn’t be able to moan about discrimination.

  • News round-up

    100,000 people marched through Hong Kong yesterday in support of democracy. This was more than the organizers estimate of around 20,000 (which I thought was rather pessimistic) but significantly fewer than marched in July. The police issued a rather mysterious estimate of the number they believed had gathered in Victoria Park before setting off (37,000) but declined to estimate the number of marchers. The government issued a weird statement saying they would listen carefully to the aspirations of the citizens who marched. How do you listen to aspirations, I wonder?

    Meanwhile, the latest news on the possible SARS case in Guangzhou is that it probably is SARS, but no-one is sure yet. Remember that after the SARS epidemic was over, the government revised the figures for the number of cases and number of deaths, concluding that many people who had been thought to have SARS did not have it.

    Even if this is confirmed as a SARS case, the encouraging thing is that it hasn’t been covered up and no-one else appears to have been infected. Even if we carry on getting a few isolated cases of SARS through the winter, there seems to be every reason to believe that it will be kept under control.

    Meanwhile, only 44 Hong Kong firms have so far registered under the Cepa arrangements. Damp squib or what?

    TVB Pearl’s review of the year was (unintentionally) hilarious. They sent the presenters (Chris Lincoln and Regina somebody) out and about in Hong Kong to present the links between the filmed reports, and both of them had great difficulty walking and talking at the same time and just didn’t know what to do when they weren’t talking (look at the camera? nod in agreement? look at their fellow presenter?). Marvellous.

  • The circus comes to town

    Yesterday we went to the circus – the Great Moscow Circus in Wan Chai.

    I haven’t been to the circus since I was a child (quite a long time ago). Billy Smart’s Circus used to come to Clapham Common every year, usually just before Christmas, and a trip there was quite an exciting event.

    This was in the days when circuses in the UK were still allowed to have performing animals, and I think they had elephants, monkeys, horses and possibly tigers. There were also clowns, juggling, high wire walking, trapeze, and probably more besides. My memories are of it being cold outside, the big top, and the smell of the place (straw and animals, I guess).

    (more…)

  • WASP view of the world

    A revealing view of the world from Hemlock in the Gweilo Diaries

    I’m happy with the Neocons’ broad analysis: the superiority of anglo-saxon political and economic philosophies is self-evident. Simple anglo-saxon (as it happens) empiricism suggests the whole world would be a better and safer place if it shared the values of the US, the UK or Australia. There’s a reason people lock themselves into containers or sail in leaking ships to get into these countries.

    The world would be a fairly boring place if that ever happened. Incidentally, why is Australia in the list and not Canada?

    I say that the world would be a better place if we still had the British Empire – that would put Johnny Foreigner in his place

    The issue that interests me here is immigration. The number of so-called “asylum seekers” wanting to come to the UK is a hot political issue, and the Labour government seems to be responding to this by doing it all it can to make their lives more difficult. One of the issues in the recent Californian election was illegal immigrants, and John Howard boosted his popularity just before last election by being tough on immigration. Closer to home, in the years leading up to the handover of Hong Kong, the British government disgracefully refused to offer Hong Kong citizens the automatic right to emigrate to the UK.

    Why do governments that apparently believe in freedom and the market economy feel so threatened by immigration? Experience tells us that people who want to give up their homes and family and travel thousands of mile and start a new life in a foreign country are usually the most enterprising and hard-working. Some countries (Ireland historically, and Italy currently) are very worried by the loss of the brighest and best, and there is clear evidence that this is damaging to the economy.

    One of the problems facing Britain and many other developed countries is that the population is getting older. This is caused by the combination of increased life expectancy and lower birth rates. The ratio of working people (paying taxes) and retired people (drawing a pension) will change quite dramatically, and could have a serious impact – the state pension is funded from taxes, and to top that up people will withdraw money invested in the stock market. So what does Britain need? More working people who will pay taxes, save money, and invest in the stock market. Where could they come from, I wonder?

  • Banned

    My broadband connection is down, so I won’t be posting much until they come and fix it.

    I seem to have been banned from the NTSCMP discussion forum. Yesterday I posted a comment there, and the system remembered my email address and this website address, which were included with the comment. George deleted the website address and posted a comment saying that he had done this but that I was free to comment. It seems not, because when I tried to post a reply I got a message saying I was banned from the forum!!

    So much for free speech.

    The discussion forum is not exactly lively – most of the comments seem to come from George himself, and when anyone else challenges him he doesn’t seem interested in debating.

    Since George obviously doesn’t believe in posting links to other websites (apart from deleting my details he also lists “boring” blogs without giving their URLS – how pointless is that?), I’ll leave you to find NTSCMP for yourself.

    [See comment from George – he says that he banned me by mistake]