Hong Kong’s businesses, markets kept calm and carried on even as city streets were choked with biggest protest rallies in history

Hong Kong’s residents carried on business and their daily lives as usual, even as the local legislature was rendered inoperable for the past month by rallies that clogged the city’s streets with the biggest number of protesters in history.

The Hang Seng Index actually rose by 7.1 per cent since an estimated 1 million people took to the streets in protest on June 9, while the local currency strengthened by 59 basis points against the US dollar over the same period, bolstered by a truce in the year-long US-China trade war. Compare that with Occupy Central, the previous record holder of public protests, when the stock benchmark fell 2.8 per cent over 79 days in 2014.

Dramatic pictures of the rallies made headlines around the world, resulting in an unprecedented apology by the city’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and an indefinite postponement of the controversial extradition bill that sparked the citywide opposition. Even as the legislature delayed several ordinances and bills, commerce was barely dented in Asia’s second-largest financial market.

“It is business as usual for most Hongkongers, who understand that the markets will always rise soon after a crisis or a protest,” said Wader Securities’ chief executive Tammy Shu Yee-nar, who had been trading stocks since the 1980s through the post-Tiananmen crackdown protests in 1989, Asia’s first financial crisis of 1997, Hong Kong’s Sars outbreak of 2003 and the Occupy Central rallies of 2014. “Hongkongers have short memories, and they will soon go back to business after the marches and protests end. It is time to make money.”