The protesters recently seen camping outside the Hongkong Bank headquarters had joined a global crusade against perceived corporate wrongdoing, known as Occupy Wall Street. But away from their demonstration, for several years now a local ad hoc protest group has been protesting against banks that sold defaulted Lehman Brothers minibonds.
Both movements have their supporters and detractors, but the minibond protests are an arguably more successful movement, and one that is all the more surprising for happening in the home of free markets and naked capitalism.
The problem for the global crusaders is that their targets, the elimination of market greed and reform of the banking industry, are too wide and imprecise to be met. They argue that this misses the point because the object of the protests is to raise awareness. But it begs the question of what comes next.
Other Hong Kong protests have been more sharply focused and far more successful in demanding - and getting - a result.
Most famous are the protests seen in Central over the past three years. They have been vociferous in calling for full compensation for the estimated 43,700 local investors, who bought so-called minibonds issued by the collapsed Lehman Brothers. They claim these complex leveraged products were anything but mini and certainly not bonds.
When Lehman collapsed in 2008 the investors faced a total wipeout of their investment (see Bonds Away).