HONG Kong's success story and its runaway stock market are built on quicksand, and nobody seems to have noticed.
The territory is anything but self-sufficient - it never has been. It shot to prosperity on the back of opium it never actually produced, but rather traded.
And more than 100 years later trade is about 300 per cent of its gross domestic product.
The trouble with trade is that it only works when there is someone to trade with. If the buyers go away you're back at square one.
After China launched a well-publicised programme to temper spending, of course Hong Kong exports were going to suffer.
With America, Europe and Japan lodged in recession that seems just precisely as long as a piece of string, who is left to buy the produce being churned out by Hong Kong factories in coastal south China? In June export growth slumped to 6.6 per cent. It picked up again in July, to 19.1 per cent, before slipping back to 13.1 per cent in August.