The Tragedy of HSBC
“A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue of The Times, with the page turned down at the chess problem.”
While America burns, the dollar tumbles, stock markets soar, Germany announces a massive bailout programme which dwarfs the pennies Italy desperately needs, the ECB gets ready for another money dump, and UK politicians grumble about queues… life goes on.
There is something deeply tragic about yesterday’s announcements from HSBC and Standard Chartered supporting the imposition of China’s Security Law in Hong Kong.
We can all act shocked and damn them for supping with the devil, but neither bank had any real choice but to make the unpalatable decision to support the unsupportable. Both know their futures depend too much on China’s patronage to survive without kow-towing.
Yesterday, they each wrote the first lines of the final few paragraphs of their own obituaries.
10-years ago I wrote in the Porridge why HSBC was my top bank stock. I said something along the lines of while other banks will remain vulnerable, HSBC had the franchise, strength and depth to survive and thrive.
Its dividend policy was strong and would provide dull, boring, predictable returns for the long-term. The Long-term is so over.
Read the comments following any article about the two Hong Kong banks this morning and are they full of earnest virtue signalling from angry clients who say they will close their accounts. I will probably switch mine.. but only because now there is zero chance the service will get any better.
Timing is everything. I laughed out loud at a post on Linked-In from HSBC claiming leadership in ESG matters and Green funding. Really… this is not the time for HSBC to be bragging about its ethical credentials.
The sad reality is HSBC has become a patron of the Chestnut Tree Café – the bar where the purged characters from 1984 spend their last few months in isolation, irrelevancy and waiting for the axe to fall. HSBC and Standard Chartered’ future is window dressing the new Hong Kong. HSBC has become as yesterday as Deutsche Bank.
It could have been so different.