GroundTruth

HONG KONG- United Airlines flight No. 895 arrived in the long shadows of the late afternoon and came in low, skirting the edge of mainland China and then over the spectacular Hong Kong harbor, a green-blue canvas streaked white with the wake of container ships and freighters and fishing boats.

We touched down at the international airport on Lan Tau island, and our regional editor for Asia, Matt Driskill, was there to pick me up. I knew it was him because it’s hard to miss a tall guy in a Panama hat and wire-rim glasses.

“Welcome to Hong Kong,” he said with a classic Oklahoma twang that still resonates in his voice even though he left his wind-swept home state more than 10 years ago to seek out a life in Asia as a foreign correspondent. He worked for years with the Asia edition of the International Herald Tribune and as a freelancer before joining us as regional editor and a columnist here in Hong Kong.

Matt has been invaluable in helping me plan this trip across Asia to recruit correspondents for Global News. I will begin the journey here in Hong Kong, then onto Beijing and Hanoi and Jakarta and Delhi where I will be meeting with dozens of journalists and government officials as we build our network of correspondents. And I’ll be keeping readers of this blog updated all along the way.

Our taxi whisked us out of the airport up and over the Tsing Yi bridge and then down through the Western Tunnel and then up and alongside the port past the scenic view of the cranes loading and off-loading containers. Finally, we descended down into the city shadows of skyscrapers that seemed too tall to fit on this small island.

I arrived at my room at the Conrad Hotel and turned on the TV and was immediately bombarded by staccato BBC and CNN broadcasts of the economic meltdown in Wall Street that had all gone down while I was flying in the silence across America and the Pacific. The broadcasters were breathless with the big headlines that the once-prodigious Lehman Bros. had declared bankruptcy, and the equally stunning news that Bank of America would take over another failing giant in investment banking, Merrill Lynch.

On the BBC, an economic analyst was comparing the events of this day to the 1929 crash that led to the Great Depression. And just when I thought it was typical British overstatement on the American economy, there on CNN was former Fed Reserve Chairman, the “maestro” himself, Alan Greenspan, calling the collapse of Lehman Bros “a once in a century event,” the worst thing he had ever seen in his long run holding the conductor’s baton of the America’s economy.

The reckoning for the American economy, it seems, had truly arrived.

You could immediately feel the full impact here of the US economic crisis on Wall Street even before the markets opened up in New York.

After 20 hours of flying, I cleaned up a bit and was invited to Matt’s home for dinner with his warm and charming French wife, Emmanuelle, and their 4-year-old son, Louis, at their pleasant home not far from the University of Hong Kong.

The talk this evening was of the economy. And about how we as a news organization would try to cover this story after we launch in January, how we could make our coverage stand apart from the breathless tone of the business reporters. How could you put it in a global context and offer our viewers a different perspective?

The sense of the global economy and how we are all inter-connected was alive and kicking in every conversation no matter how brief on this first day in Hong Kong. Even in the small-talk chat with a Hong Kong taxi driver on my way home, the discussion turned to Wall Street.

The cab driver who spoke with a thick accent, pronouncing the investment firm “Lay-MAN.” He offered this analysis: “You could feel it coming. Bad news for America and bad news for America’s stock market is bad news for the whole world. Wait. You see bad news tomorrow everywhere.”

Backing up the cab driver’s analysis was the news that the London stock market closed down sharply and more tremors were feared across the world. Already the Dow had tumbled 381 points by the time I went to bed.