The headline of your editorial of October 8 calls Tung Chee-hwa's speech a 'flat address', and I would agree with you that the Chief Executive neither offered any quick fixes nor hope for the present crisis to go away in the short term; but what else could he have said? His only alternative would have been to make it painfully clear to all of us that: Ordinary Hong Kongers, many local banks, as well as the Government's own coffers, had, for decades, increasingly and overly relied on property as their main source of income - and lost.
Spiralling property prices also pushed many salaries and virtually all goods and services to levels which (even now) are far higher than in most other major cities the world over - and all of them must still come down further, before we can compete internationally.
The present government can at best try to deflate this (largely inherited) unsustainable bubble in a manner where we will all lose feathers, but where at least, for example, a banking crisis can be avoided.
Prices and salaries, once having come down to internationally competitive levels, will (and indeed should) stay there.
With government income dramatically falling, it is hardly the time to boost social welfare, and strictly impossible to bail out all those 'newly poor', who now pay dearly for 'past sins', where they borrowed money to buy (long-overpriced) real estate, trusting/speculating that the bubble would never burst.
By stating the obvious, Mr Tung's address would have been shorter and certainly less soothing.
