Hong Kong offers many delights to the curious expat. But one spectacle that never gets old is the city’s regular run of typhoons, which suspend trading, stop people from going to work and, very occasionally, require an umbrella. This week, Typhoon Hato provided a particularly visceral example.
This was an unusually strong typhoon. The Hong Kong Observatory gave it a grade of 10, the highest rating possible. But every storm cloud has a silver lining. In this case, it is the fact that almost everyone got the day off.
Although bankers are supposed to work from home during a typhoon, the approach to doing so is fairly standard for most junior bankers: send plenty of early emails to look busy, preferably as open-ended as possible to delay the inevitable responses; make a few key phone calls that give the air of a frantic pace of work; and then spend the rest of the day in your pyjamas, eating crisps and watching Netflix.
Spare a thought, then, for those equities traders who arrived at their desks by the early hours of the morning and stayed at work as the worst typhoon in half a decade ravaged Hong Kong.
You could not blame them for feeling miffed. The suspension of Hong Kong stock trading meant these unlucky traders were among the few who really should have had a day off. But worse than that, they could not even have a relaxing day at the office.
After all, they had to work their way through all those open-ended emails.