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It is being reported that Hong Kong’s role as a global financial hub is in question due to the city’s inability to reopen its borders and the unwillingness of its population to get the COVID Jab.
“We are effectively signaling that we are closed for business,” an American banker in the city told The Financial Times. “Hong Kong’s position as an important financial center is in question.”
Tabby Kinder wrote in the paper that observers blame the city’s slow vaccine rollout and its “failure to outline an exit plan from the pandemic.” She pointed out that the city has only vaccinated 17 percent of its 7.5 million residents, and that includes only 5 percent of those under the age of 70.
The report said Hong Kong continues to enforce a two-or-three week hotel quarantine for returning residents and foreigners cannot visit. Frederik Gollob, the chairman of Hong Kong’s European Chamber of Commerce, told The FT that the territory could “lose its competitive edge to attract top talent.”
Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, has said that she will not risk the health of the population in order to reopen the borders. The city has allowed executives from certain firms in mainland China to travel without restrictions.
The city said last week that four executives from companies in the city would be able to travel without the quarantine restrictions, but the “small print” showed that these workers would be forced to return to quarantine after a day of work. David Webb, an activist investor, told the paper that the rule is like “day release for prisoners.”
One letter to the editor in the South China Morning Post called the quarantine as “arbitrarily creating an uneven wealth/status-based playing field. This breaches human rights entitlements to equal, non-discriminatory treatment.”
TREND FORECAST: Beyond the headlines, there is more to the reluctance of businesses to do business in Hong Kong.
Indeed, since the COVID War broke out during Chinese Lunar New Year in January 2020, in the city of 7,555,000 people there have been just 210 deaths or 0.00278 percent of Hong Kong’s population. And over the course of 17 months just 0.000164 percent have died per month.
Thus, there is much more to the concern of doing business in Hong Kong than the coronavirus.
The Trends Journal has reported on the changing political dynamics in Hong Kong after Beijing tightened its grip on the city. As Gerald Celente forecast when the virus first broke out in China last January, Beijing would use COVID to achieve what they were unable to accomplish before the virus struck Wuhan: lock down Hong Kong to stop the protests.