Offence should not be taken as market forces scalpers into action
PICTURE YOURSELF AT a game of poker. You hold two sixes and the nervous Nellie across from you, who was uncertain about playing for more than pennies and who has already folded several obviously decent hands, hesitantly pushes five chips to the centre of the table. Your way lies clear.
'See your five and raise you five,' you say in a voice of confident authority and he sighs, letting his cards drop to reveal a full house.
'What did you have?' he asks.
'Not telling,' you reply and slide your cards back into the deck face down.
You fraudster, you market manipulator. Lucky you that this was only a game of poker played behind drawn curtains because if you tried bluffing as a dealer on the stock market or even, heaven forbid, in order to get better prices for a fistful of tickets you bought as a scalper, you could be looking at a term in jail.
'Police probe Olympics show scalpers,' said a headline on page 3 of our main news section on Saturday.
The offence under investigation was not just that they had been scalpers but that they may have sought to inflate the prices they were getting by bidding them up on their own internet sites under the guise of being buyers.
That would be fraud, say the police. Very well, if the law says it is fraud, then fraud it is but, frankly, it does not offend me. I regard it as bluff, just as it would be in a poker game, and I simply cannot get upset about it.
People who deal with scalpers can be under no illusion about how they are buying their tickets. If they want to deal in the jungle, then they ought to be prepared for the law of the jungle and, if they are not, then tough luck to them.
But, on another level, our government has only itself to blame for creating this jungle world of scalpers. It offered tickets to several performances in Hong Kong by mainland athletes who had won gold medals at the Olympics and it priced those tickets at only $10 apiece.
I can conceive of several reasons for doing so, high among them that it would be a political embarrassment if there were empty seats at these events.
There might also be an outcry if anyone could be made to plead on camera that he or she wanted to go but could not afford to do so. Patriots denied their opportunity to join in a celebration of national achievement? We certainly cannot have that.
Thus $10 apiece it was and 1,300 tickets for the diving demonstrations were predictably sold in just 30 minutes. Any danger of empty seats was averted and no one was denied a seat for lack of the price of one. What was needed was not money, or even patriotism, but speed in getting into the ticket line.
Yet it was clearly a mispricing of those tickets. They would easily have sold out quickly for $100 apiece, possibly $500, and this was perfectly apparent at the time. The organisers of the event had only to recall the enthusiasm shown here late last year for a glimpse at China's first man in space.
It was perfectly apparent to the scalpers, however, and scalpers are created when tickets are mispriced. Our government made a conscious decision to let political considerations override normal pricing of a market, which it is perfectly entitled to do. I cannot object.
But it then should not lament that scalpers got into the ticket line-ups and are now offering those tickets at 10 times their list price or more. It invited them to do so. It as good as published formal invitation cards to them.
And it did more than just that. By pricing those tickets at such a ridiculously low level for the enormous demand, it encouraged the scalpers to play games with the huge margin they had been given between the official price and fair market price.
The game of bluff that some of them are now alleged to have played, of creating a false market to push prices up artificially to where they thought the real market lay, would have been a very risky one for them if the real market had not indeed been so much further up.
There was no point, for instance, in trying it last year at Real Madrid's appearance in Hong Kong, when demand was less than had been anticipated and many scalpers reportedly lost money.
To give this particular game of bluff a chance at succeeding you need a truly wide gulf between ticket prices set artificially low and the real prices that people are willing to pay for them.
The scalpers got that gulf on this occasion, which, once again, our government is fully within its rights to give them if it so chooses.
But what it cannot do, at least not with my sympathy, is then get upset that these scalpers took advantage of the opportunity.
If offence it is, who was responsible for encouraging them to commit that offence?
