For the past six months, Hong Kong, the financial capital of Asia and one of the world’s leading export cities, was facing violent protests. The main cause of these protests was the ‘Extradition bill’ which allow the Mainland to detain suspected criminals. However, the bill was immediately scrapped, the protests continued and over the course of time turned more violent, leading to 16 deaths.
Things did not seem to improve and Hong Kong was burning from within. Even Universities were closing down and few Nordic countries asked it’s students to come back to their respective countries. The police was brutal and unjust, Beijing sent in military forces inside Hong Kong. The offices were shut, business were put on hold. One of the Largest financial capital of the world was suffering and it was clearly indicated, th stock markets, export centers and day to day jobs were seriously affected. The big banks were shut down and the economy of the city was slowly crashing.
Recently, in order to put an end to the unrests and violence, the Chinese government has eased up on the protesters and even the protest groups have been told not to use violence as a means. For the Stock Market, which has a market capitalisation of $29.9 trillion and is the fifth largest stock exchange in the world. Hong Kong Stock exchange has started showing improvement this due to the following reasons
1. The democratic elections in the city has lead to a 3 percent jump in the stock index.
2. The trade war between USA and China is slowly coming to an end, therefore Hong Kong, which is the largest exporter to US has seen an increase in exports and this has lead to a jump in the market.
3. Mainland China giant ‘Alibaba’ has decided to list it’s IPO in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, this could be the largest IPO of this year with a $13 billion share sale.
Thus the markets in Hong Kong seem to be coming back to normal and as the English proverb says “Every cloud has a silver lining” this improving stock market may be the best thing that has happened to Hong Kong in a long time.
Financially Frantic 