Consumer confidence
April 27th 1999 08:50
I lived in Hong Kong for 16 years until 2007. In 1998 and 1999 I wrote a series of political and social commentaries for a quirky institutional newsletter - quirky in that it was intended to be as much contentious, offbeat and humorous as it was informative. I was working as an editor, and I wrote the articles under the pseudonym Red Inque. I post them here for anyone interested in a look at life in Asia at the time, and in Hong Kong just after its return to Chinese sovereignty.
Posting a recovery
Hong Kong’s most important economic and business confidence indicator hit 70 on Saturday. We are referring, of course, to the number of pages of job advertisements in The South China Morning Post. Back in the good old days, before the Great Asian Myocardial Infarction, the SCMP’s Saturday job ads ran in the high 100s, and for a while there in 1997 it was regularly more than 200 and needed seven folds to present.
Those were the days. The Hong Kong Government used to produce underemployment figures, by sector. The big property developers would line up outside the Legco Building, on their knees, to deliver petitions pleading for more construction workers to be allowed in. There were shortages of people in every white collar area. Accountants and lawyers and analysts would command astronomical wages, and if they didn’t like their job they could always find another, probably at double the wage, in the following Saturday’s Post.
At the time, The South China Morning Post was the most profitable newspaper in the world. Red Inque worked there occasionally, doing casual editing shifts in the business section. One evening the display advertising department rang three times and increased the size of the next day’s section. It had been huge to start. By the end it ran to 24 pages, the most ever. Around 1am, as the paper was being put to bed, the Business Editor announced to the desk that the business section of this one edition of the newspaper was worth HK$17m in advertising revenue. It was a record. We filed out and went to the pub, where we still had to buy our own beer.
But HK$17m was peanuts compared to what those Saturday display ads brought in. Back then, there was a huge picture of the front page of the SCMP splashed on an advertising billboard at the Star Ferry terminal. In the top right corner of the front page, the figure 228 was clearly visible, this being the number of pages of jobs ads that day.
We have no idea how much money 228 pages of job ads represents, but we know it is a lot more than 48 pages, which is what the SCMP got down to a couple of months ago. They stopped putting the number on the front page of the Saturday edition (and about the same time the Star Ferry billboard ad was taken down), but we would check out of interest. It was a weekly reality dose.
And now it is rising again. We cracked the 60 level a couple of weeks ago, and we had 70 on Saturday. The number is even back on the front page, the paper proudly showing how it is going up. We are referring, of course, to confidence.
Tell me Dobkins: How long have you been with us – not counting today? -- David Frost (The Sack and How to Give It)
Posting a recovery
Hong Kong’s most important economic and business confidence indicator hit 70 on Saturday. We are referring, of course, to the number of pages of job advertisements in The South China Morning Post. Back in the good old days, before the Great Asian Myocardial Infarction, the SCMP’s Saturday job ads ran in the high 100s, and for a while there in 1997 it was regularly more than 200 and needed seven folds to present.
Those were the days. The Hong Kong Government used to produce underemployment figures, by sector. The big property developers would line up outside the Legco Building, on their knees, to deliver petitions pleading for more construction workers to be allowed in. There were shortages of people in every white collar area. Accountants and lawyers and analysts would command astronomical wages, and if they didn’t like their job they could always find another, probably at double the wage, in the following Saturday’s Post.
At the time, The South China Morning Post was the most profitable newspaper in the world. Red Inque worked there occasionally, doing casual editing shifts in the business section. One evening the display advertising department rang three times and increased the size of the next day’s section. It had been huge to start. By the end it ran to 24 pages, the most ever. Around 1am, as the paper was being put to bed, the Business Editor announced to the desk that the business section of this one edition of the newspaper was worth HK$17m in advertising revenue. It was a record. We filed out and went to the pub, where we still had to buy our own beer.
But HK$17m was peanuts compared to what those Saturday display ads brought in. Back then, there was a huge picture of the front page of the SCMP splashed on an advertising billboard at the Star Ferry terminal. In the top right corner of the front page, the figure 228 was clearly visible, this being the number of pages of jobs ads that day.
We have no idea how much money 228 pages of job ads represents, but we know it is a lot more than 48 pages, which is what the SCMP got down to a couple of months ago. They stopped putting the number on the front page of the Saturday edition (and about the same time the Star Ferry billboard ad was taken down), but we would check out of interest. It was a weekly reality dose.
And now it is rising again. We cracked the 60 level a couple of weeks ago, and we had 70 on Saturday. The number is even back on the front page, the paper proudly showing how it is going up. We are referring, of course, to confidence.
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