Some publications recount history– and after that some let you stroll in its steps, tracing every passion, tension, and seismic pivot with the lived experience of institutions and the people who shaped them. The Lion Wakes by David Kynaston and Richard Roberts belongs to the last. Take a seat in conference rooms, trace deals extending continents, and witness the unraveling dramatization as HSBC changes from a regional financial institution in early american Hong Kong into a worldwide giant rooted in London– yet still linked, totally, to its eastern origins.
From East to West: The Financial institution’s Global Transformation
If the book has a trailhead, it’s the late 1970 s and very early 1980 s– when HSBC’s contemporary awakening began. The narrative opens with the procurement of Marine Midland in the USA– HSBC’s bold leap across the Pacific, marking the begin of an age in which the bank would certainly no longer continue to be a regional pressure yet emerge as a global gamer.
What complied with was nothing short of a strategic earthquake: the risky takeover of Midland Bank in the UK in 1992, which caused the critical change of headquarters from Hong Kong to London, forming today’s HSBC Holdings. This move had not been simply geographic. It was geopolitical: a bush versus the unpredictabilities bordering Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China, and a bridge …