Hong Kong's seers beat an army of western economists and forecasters when it came to predicting this week's spectacular financial collapse.

The ancient Chinese almanac, which originated more than 1,000 years ago in the Tang dynasty, foretold that 1998 would be a bad year for birds in Hong Kong. It was spot on.

First, more than a million chickens were slaughtered to stem a deadly avian virus nicknamed "bird flu". And the latest casualty of the Asian financial crisis is the once high-flying Hong Kong investment bank Peregrine Investment Holdings. Its logo? A peregrine falcon.