It’s been a tough couple of weeks for the city’s influential demographic of soothsayers, charlatans, svengalis, sex wizards, poseurs and all-around general mountebanks.

It wasn’t too long ago when all it took in this town to convince a certain breed of naïve, unthinking woman to have intercourse with you eight times in a row were vague promises of eventual fortune (“You didn’t get gonorrhea—see? Fortune.”), or at the very least, the guarantee of a modeling contract for a mainland maternity catalog. Or if sex wasn’t your thing, and you preferred three payments of $888 million in cash by truck, all it took to get that was the better part of an afternoon spent burying some jade in a billionaire’s backyard. Life was better back then.

The only mildly difficult bit was meeting a gullible billionaire. Fortunately, that’s not too hard in a society bursting at the cravat with enormous wealth passed down through successive generations. You start with a pool of moneyed offspring, send them to boarding school

in the UK, then the Ivy League. The smartest among them usually filter up and into their own ventures; the lazy head for the civil service. For the ones that are about half-half, you can spin off one of your own businesses for them to run. The remaining ones aren’t too hard to spot. Usually, they’ll be at a cocktail reception for a new timepiece launch or beating up police officers who try to arrest them for drunk-driving. That’s still a pretty good pool of marks. Put on a nice suit, grab a geomancy compass and hit up the next cocktail party.

But alas, the tide is turning in favor of rational thought and sensible deductions. The jig was up last week for a sex wizard who was found guilty of tricking a woman into sex. And this week, the granddaddy of all svengali-charlatans and his preposterous claims to the Nina Wang Chinachem fortune were soundly smacked down. With the law coming down against self-professed mystics, could we be approaching a new kind of Enlightment? Will apartments no longer decrease in value because someone died there once? Will property developers finally stop slapping “8s” on all their floors to maximize auspiciousness—and more importantly, will people stop buying them at double the going rate?

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. After all, there’s the $66.9 billion express train, positioned just so in its expensive, feng shui-friendly projected route. And let’s not forget the legislative councilors resigning to fight for at least a smidgen of accountability in the government being labeled as revolutionaries promoting secession from China and independence. Crazy may yet have its day again.