Hello DJ, Good evening.
It has been a perfectly grim day, now that I get an opportunity to reflect on it as I am ensconced in my favorite nook of my home, my study achamchen.com . Yes, the TV is on, the fan is spinning, and outside the window, sounds of night critters and an occasion foghorn of a passing ship sieve through the mesh screen.
Matters are seriously not right, and coming from the other direction, anti-matter.
I had busied myself in the morning on various client matters, and then had lunch with a PRC friend who is an industrialist of some substance. He is quite well connected with the officialdom, and had poopoo-ed Hong Kong’s high alarm concerning SARS only three weeks ago. Now, he is alarmed, speaking of possible collapse of something or other, as folks have drastically cut back, to zero, of unnecessary spending.
He just checked out a full harbour-view apartment of 1,900 sqft at the Convention Plaza, contiguous and managed by Grand Hyatt, also contiguous with his harbour-view office. The apartment transacted for as much as HKD 24 mm back in 1997, sports a current ask of HKD 9 mm, and I advised him to bid HKD 6 mm, and be ready to settle at HKD 7 mm. Not a cent more.
Thus suitably mentally tuned to be a crustacean, I ambled downtown. I ran into an Australian architect friend whose client list includes some of the largest developers in town. I listened to his dismal tale of ‘there is absolutely nothing happening’. He listened to my ‘go to cash, of non-USD flavor’ warning. He will not hold tight hoping for recovery; he will lay off staff, and retire if necessary.
The key is to watch what happens to the factories within 5 hundred miles radius of where CBD Hong Kong. If the factories stop humming, then proceed from sub-basement 5 directly to nuclear winter bomb shelter.
Ok, never mind all that serious stuff.
After arriving late to my in-laws home across the street from my place, immediately after sitting down at the dining table, I was struck by one sentence of a conversation, ‘how many people died today?’
My mind tuned out the conversation. Then, a moment later, another sentence break through my mind shield, ‘the busy doctors may not be paying as much attention to older patients as they do the young ones’.
Now I am in my nook, peering at the world through Internet and cable TV, trying to process the signals, detecting any matter or anti-matter that can harm me.
Chugs, Jay |
