The conversations drifting across the sedate tearoom of the Peninsula Hotel make it sound like a trading floor two minutes before the closing bell.

Asian fund managers have hit Hong Kong in conference mode, and sub-prime fallout, exchange rate volatility, commodity squeezes and property depreciation are being debated with vigour in a dozen languages.

Five years ago, it was possible to have stood in the famous marbled hall and heard a pin drop.

And, no matter how triumphantly and robustly Hong Kong's economy has recovered over the intervening half-decade, there are few on the island for whom the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) crisis does not still cause a shudder.

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Nothing seemed quite sane then, and an entire economy was exposed as eggshell fragile.

Brokers slashed their GDP growth targets and the stock market plunged as it priced-in the risk that the mysterious superbug would end Hong Kong's dominance as the financial centre of the East.

There were plenty of visual triggers for panic. Five years ago this week the World Health Organisation had issued a travel warning for Hong Kong, and hotels fell eerily empty.

Investment bankers who had flown in for the boozy conviviality of the Hong Kong Sevens tournament - and the conveniently timed Credit Suisse investors' conference - found themselves terrifyingly quarantined on their return to London.

Urban myths, including the supposedly immunising effects of smoking cigarettes, gained instant and widespread credibility. Fraudsters who normally specialised in wallets and handbags started churning out fake Chanel antiviral facemasks.

However, despite the chill of those memories, Hong Kong in 2008 has developed a striking sense of resilience - akin, the joke runs, to a “vaccination” by the terrors of Sars.

The Hong Kong stock market, down about 25 per cent from its runaway highs of last October, has defiantly sold the story of Asia decoupling from the global economy, Tony Nafte, an economist for the investment bank CLSA, said.

Certainly, the ups and downs of the market are both passion and poison to Hong Kong's mood.

Surprisingly, the recent market slump has yet to dim seriously the overall spirit that Hong Kong is on course to make it through the global credit crunch and downturn in decent shape.

In the skyscrapers of the central business district, the anecdotes and rumours are geared towards re-enforcing that bullishness.

There is talk that, although jobs in the City and on Wall Street will be aggressively hewn away by the crisis, the Hong Kong offices of those same firms could find themselves in hiring mode.

The crowds in some jewellery shops spill on to the streets as mainland Chinese visitors snap up gold and platinum trinkets as the ultimate portable investment.

The Hong Kong initial public offering market - down to an indiscernible trickle this year and described by one Goldman Sachs executive as “dead” - is carefully being dismissed by the investment bankers as a mere “shop window” of more important financing, M&A and trading activities that continue unabated.

This week, in a rare public speech about his global property empire, the Duke of Westminster informed a Hong Kong audience of pinstriped suits that his company's portfolio soon would shift 20 per cent of its assets into Asia.

Some are worried that the pace of property price growth in Hong Kong will sink like a stone. The duke described it buoyantly as a market of “dynamism, of decisiveness and, perhaps most importantly, of fun”.

And yet, as the Asia fund managers shake off their rugby hangovers and focus on the risks to their portfolios, there will be many nagging doubts.

In the past few weeks, pet owners have been hoarding dog biscuits and hamster treats in reaction to the price of pet food climbing by 20 per cent.

It is a symptom of a wider local inflation issue that is exacerbated by the Hong Kong dollar's peg to the US dollar and to falling American interest rates.

HSBC economists say that Hong Kong's exposure to rising commodity prices and labour costs could cause the underlying inflation rate to rise to 5 per cent in the next few months.

Mr Nafte said that question marks over European growth could also create headwinds for Hong Kong.

The European Central Bank appears, for the moment, to be targeting inflation, but it could soon switch to targeting slowing growth. A fall in the euro - and with it the strong purchasing power for Hong Kong's exports - would hurt.

Equally unsettling has been the discovery that Hong Kong Disneyland - the theme park built post-Sars in a government-backed effort to rekindle the tourist trade - suffered a 23 per cent slump in visitor numbers in its second year of operation.

That bombshell, coupled with early suggestions that mainland visitor numbers to the gambling haven of Macau may have fallen sharply in January and February this year, is creating another cause for concern.

One senior Cathay Pacific executive said that tourism in Hong Kong has been tailored increasingly towards the mainland visitors - Disney for children, shopping for the mothers and casinos for the fathers.

Evidence that the tourism business is quite so sensitive to short-term setbacks in the Chinese growth story does not fit neatly with the theories of the Hong Kong bulls.

However, it has exposed a seismic mentality shift that might not have happened without the surreal weeks of early 2003.

The animal markets of China may have been the place where the Sars virus spread, but five years since that crisis, Hong Kong looks to the mainland more with greed than with fear.

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