HSBC strains reach breaking point
As a financial expression of globalisation, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation has had a long history stretching back to its founding by a Scot in 1865. And as recently as seven years ago, the core of its model — financing China’s business activities with the world — looked smarter than ever.
Remember The Plough at Cadsden? That’s the pub where then UK prime minister David Cameron supped ale with Xi Jinping, a couple of days after the Chinese premier had told British parliamentarians that the UK and China had formed an “interdependent community of entwined interests”.
Today though, those interests are rapidly untwining. President Xi is turning increasingly authoritarian at home and hostile towards the west. And HSBC’s business model is gratingly out of kilter in a generally fracturing world. Tensions between Hong Kong and London — HSBC’s twin bases — are particularly acute.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Patrick Jenkins
