Hong Kong Real Time Quotes

As Thatcher imposed the policies which earned her the name “The Iron Lady,” unemployment in Britain doubled, rising from 1.5 million when she came into office, to a level of 3 million by the end of her first eighteen months in office. Labor unions were targetted under Thatcher as obstacles to the success of the monetarist “revolution,” a prime cause of the “enemy,” inflation. All the time, with British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell exploiting the astronomical prices of $36 or more per barrel for their North Sea oil, never a word was uttered against big oil or the City of London banks which were amassing huge sums of capital in the situation. Thatcher also moved to accommodate the big City banks by removing exchange controls, so that instead of capital being invested in rebuilding Britain’s rotted industrial base, funds flowed out to speculate in real estate in Hong Kong or lucrative loans to Latin America.

So that’s where to look for the bursts in the next real estate crash. It’ll come from those cities where foreign buyers and wealthy speculators have driven prices to the extremes, specifically Hong Kong, London, Singapore, Manhattan (as opposed to broader New York), Vancouver, San Francisco, and Sydney. On the flip side, the most affordable large cities in the United States are Atlanta, with valuations at 3.1 times income, Dallas at 3.7, Chicago at 3.8, and Tampa and Phoenix, both at 4.1. These are cities where everyday people can still (barely) afford houses.

The trouble with a deep freeze is that you have no idea what will happen when you unfreeze, esp after such a prolonged time. As it is, you worry about defrosting the chicken that has sat in your freezer for a month or so, purchased with all good intentions to cook & consume before its use-by-date, but somehow, chicken never quite appeals to my home-cooking taste buds when all the Chinese cuisines in HK restaurants do a much better job than you can imagine. Future tense is like that: desire suspended, more imaginary than real.

The Key to Midnight was the first novel that I wrote under the pen name Leigh Nichols, which I now no longer use. The other Nichols novels included Shadowfires, The Servants of Twilight, and The House of Thunder, which have previously been put under my real name, and one other that will be reissued in paperback in 1996. Like all my pen names, Leigh met a tragic end. (Please see the Afterword to The Funhouse for the story of the death of ‘Owen West,’ who also wrote The Mask.) I used to tell people that while taking a tour for research purposes, Leigh had been killed in an explosion at a jalapeno-processing plant. Later, I insisted that Leigh died in a catastrophic rickshaw pile-up in Hong Kong. The truth, of course, is uglier. After drinking too much champagne one evening on a Caribbean cruise ship, Leigh Nichols was decapitated in a freak limbo accident. This first Nichols book was meant to be my stab at an action-suspense-romance novel with a background of international intrigue, because I like to read stories of that kind when they are well done. Before giving Berkley Books the go-ahead to reprint Key, I reread it. Although many readers who discovered this novel through the years wrote to say that they enjoyed it, I decided that I hadn’t succeeded with the original version as well as I’d thought at the time. Furthermore, it needed to be updated to reflect world events since its initial publication.