After we returned from London the first personal finance decision I made was to accumulate the pound sterling whenever opportunities arise. Despite the jet lag I immediately instructed my stockbroker to collect my HSBC dividends in pounds. My shareholding in HSBC is dismally small and it will take many years to save one airline ticket to London with the dividends for two board lots of shares in the bank. But if Her Majesty's subjects in the colony of Hong Kong have ever learnt something from the empire, the virtue of incremental changes should be at the top of the long list.
The second decision I have since made is to sever all relationships with banks owned or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. True it is that the HSBC and Standard Chartered have made a commercial decision not to allocate a single dollar of their advertising budget to Apple Daily, the most read Chinese newspaper in the city, and in this sense they are as "patriotic" as the Bank of China. But then there is no secret that the Bank of China and other PRC banks have been deploying their staff in Hong Kong for all sorts of political missions given by Beijing. On this score the British, local and other non-PRC bankers are almost like saints.
These are so much and so little that I can do now.
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