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Opinion
The View
by Stephen Vines
The View
by Stephen Vines

Shanghai-Hong Kong stock link opening feast a rite of self-importance

Official launch of stock connect an opportunity for a lot of serious types to engage in trivial things

I appear to have discovered yet another reason why I will never become a big league chief executive or even a mogul of finance.

This realisation dawned on Monday when, for reasons far too tedious to explain, I found myself at the stock exchange observing the ceremony celebrating the link between the Hong Kong and Shanghai markets. Others are more qualified to pontificate on the virtues or otherwise of this scheme, but for me it triggered far more trivial thoughts.

Come to think of it however, are they really so trivial? The thing is that this ceremony involved many serious finance types, big league business leaders and, of course, the usual bevy of bureaucrats and office holders, who had taken time off to demonstrate the art of balancing a glass of champagne while shuffling around the hall and making a very fine impression of looking both delighted and interested to meet other champagne glass carriers.

Some may think this is easy, but trust me, like many things that appear to be effortless, this one involves both skill and practice of a kind well beyond my capabilities. It is no small thing to be able to look enthusiastic and indeed delighted while standing in tight shoes and being subjected to the type of small talk that makes you yearn for the stimulus of reading an electricity bill.

In most other circumstances, the big boss can delegate a menial operative to carry out boring and repetitive tasks, but when it comes to events of this kind, delegation is thought not to be an option.

Many of those who attend are bureaucrats and office holders who almost certainly do less harm when clutching a champagne flute than in their normal course of business.

But what about other attendees who are actually engaged in productive activity? They include some highest-paid executives who are compelled to take time out to engage in this specialised glass-clutching, nodding and schmoozing activity. Were this activity to be subjected to a cost benefit analysis, it surely would show the need for a rethink of this crazy business model.

As matters stand, these champagne-themed events (where, incidentally, this fine drink tends to be shamelessly wasted) are deployed for purposes as diverse as product launches to anniversaries to ego-boosting celebrations for immodest individuals and for much else that is considered to be significant.

Sometimes it is possible to understand why these events are held, for example, to celebrate the achievement of a hedge fund managing to survive for more than three years without going bust.

However, the example of the Shanghai-Hong Kong stock connect fandango makes it hard to see what was achieved even though it was simultaneously held in two locations (the Shanghai attendees, however, got to sit down), deployed the use of three languages and provided employment for a number of imagination-challenged speech writers.

The thinking, such as it is, is that to launch a project such as this requires a lot of noise - gongs are banged to underline this point - a lot of excruciatingly poor music of a dramatic variety, copious quantities of largely un-drunk booze, the summoning of the serried ranks of the great unwashed media and the deployment of many flunkies with ear pieces whose job seemed to mainly consist of scurrying around making a nuisance of themselves.

Once trading started, the market, which after all was presumably what this was all about, did what it would have done anyway. In this case, there was almost certainly a degree of orchestration to boost volumes, but the "Great Leveller in the Stock Market Sky", a.k.a. share prices, put in what can only be described as a lacklustre performance.

So what was the purpose of all this brouhaha? Well, it gave a bit of face to people who deemed it necessary to have face given and it kept quite a lot of more menial people in employment. Balanced against this was the waste of a great deal of time and money and a scandalously poor allocation of resources. Imagine what would have happened had the scheme simply been launched by way of a couple of press releases and possibly some glossy newspaper ads. The answer is: more or less exactly the same result.

However, and one likes to be fair occasionally, this event did manage to showcase the not inconsiderable master of ceremony skills possessed by stock exchange chief executive Charles Li Xiaojia, who gamely managed some impressive adlibbing when his Shanghai peers droned on for longer than planned.

And there was another rather wonderfully telling reflection of the times in which we live. All umbrellas were confiscated at the door by anxious staff. Gosh, can no one be trusted not to demonstrate these days?

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Much ado about nothing
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