Recently, Hong Kong has been ranked in the list of Healthiest, Happiest and Most Expensive countries/cities to live in respectively:

Bloomberg Global Health Index - (outside of Top 50)!

World's Happiness Report 2017 - ranked #71

Economist Intelligence Unit, Most Expensive- ranked #2

On the same note, the city of Singapore is ranked #25 (but #1 in Asia) and #1 as the world's happiest and most expensive city respectively. Happy and expensive in correlation? Would be strange to think so.

What lousy English

A headline taken from a local circular in Hong Kong: 'Cathay Pacific reports second loss since 2008 as rivals’ cheaper fares erode margins.'

On 15 March 2017, Hong Kong's flagship airline, Cathay Pacific, reported a loss of HK$500+ million in its 2016 financial year. The last time the airline made an annual loss was back in the financial crisis year of 2008.

So, what it meant to say was: 'Cathay reports first loss since 2008...'

Re-imagining Too Big To Fail (TBTF)

Ranking of a few of the world's largest countries' bank assets at end-2016:

USA $16 trillion

Eurozone $31 trillion

Japan $7 trillion

and China's $33 trillion! (Lo and behold, this figure is said to be underestimated, as with everything that pertains to China) By the end of 2017, the assets are expected to increase to a whopping 37 trillion. China just announced that its targeted GDP growth for 2017 is 6.5%. For sure it will achieve this number but at what cost?

In the same context, 3 of the largest banks in the world are now China-owned.

Somehow, the above superlatives sound a bit hollow because it is just all these money sloshing around and nothing else. There are no key drivers such as productivity, innovation, etc. The result is the chunk of money transfers from one bubble to another. it is no stretch of imagination that the China government was trying to enrich the economy and the wealth of its population by handing out tons of money. However, the money was leaking out of the country and did not benefit the country nor its people. A lot of it was wasted. Now that China is trying to stop the leakage via capital controls, this money will be trapped within the country thus aggravating more bubbles within the country. China has created a money monster which it can't control.

At some point, something has to give. Nobody knows the impact within China but I think the rest of the world will certainly be on the receiving end of it. It is easy to prepare for the worst knowing how worse is going to be but this is one worse that is going to be big and outside of imagination.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Many years back, the winner of the Oscar's Best Picture award, The Departed, was based on the Hong Kong flick, Infernal Affairs, however, the former's director when accepting the award paid a compliment to the latter (although he wrongly mentioned that it was a Japanese production).

The winner for Best Picture in 2016, Moonlight, has been said to be based on a number of Hong Kong movies. You can decide yourself here:

Excerpt from 'The side-by-side comparisons that show how a Hong Kong director influenced “Moonlight':

Wong (Kar Wai)’s influence on Jenkins is clearly seen in a video made by YouTube user Alessio Marinacci, which juxtaposes scenes from Moonlight against Wong’s Days of Being Wild (1990), Happy Together (1997), and In the Mood for Love (2000). Moonlight cinematographer James Laxton also told the Film Stage blog that there was a Dropbox folder full of images, including screengrabs from Wong’s movies, in preparation for the production of Moonlight.