In Hong Kong, the locals sometime refer to HSBC as “the Lion Bank” after the pair of sculptures that adorn the corporate headquarters. After the craven capitulation of Peter Wong, HSBC’s chief executive officer in the region, to China’s curtailing of the freedoms that have allowed banking to flourish in Hong Kong, the lion bank now seems to be led by donkeys.
In 1997, when I started working as an equity strategist for HSBC in London, the principal obligation of the company was to provide a high return on capital to shareholders. In those days, before the 2008 crash demonstrated that banks are part of wider society, it was hard to get a hearing for the argument that companies burnish their reputations best when they