HSBC Again

[Pipers]

Apparently a glich!! ahead of the long weekend!!!  

 

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34084767

 

You do not need to be a genius to work out they may need the money to get through the weekend.

[Scuzzle]

Every time there is corruption and fines to be paid HSBC are never far away, as one of the companies that sets the gold pricing I hope one day the manipulation of this will catch up with them as well, I think anyone who banks with them is crazy especially now we are in the times of the bank bail in.

[Paul]

HSBC’s core values are under scrutiny again in the press.  One of the oldest and diriest banking parasites out there

 

The bank has been implicated in one scandal after another, and  the current leadership claims to be wanting to restore the bank’s reputation.     

 

But what reputation do they aim to restore? 

 

Is it the airbrushed version of a bank rooted in “Scottish banking principles”, or is it an altogether darker reputation reflecting HSBC’s original role as a source of funding for the giant trade of opium into the Chinese markets in the nineteeth century? 

 

When HSBC executives were caught late last year financing the Mexican and other drug cartels, they were returning to the company’s historic roots.

 

HSBC was founded after the second of the Opium Wars, by which time the trade was already well established. 

 

The founders included several opium traders who recognised the profitable banking opportunities presented by the new market. 

 

A Scotsman, Thomas Sutherland, had joined P&O. He devoted his career to the company, worked on the construction of new wharves in Hong Kong and became the Hong Kong superintendent of P&O as well as the first chairman of Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock in 1863.

 

Opium made up 70% of maritime freight from India to China, where it was sold to the Chinese by British compradores, despite all efforts by the Chinese authorities to stop it.

 

Sutherland understood that the time was right for a commercial bank. In 1865 he and a few others founded the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. The board was chaired by Francis Chomley, and included the remarkable Thomas Dent, founder of Dent & Co.

 

In 1839 a senior Chinese government official, Lin Zexu, known for his competence and moral standing, issued a warrant for Dent’s arrest in an attempt to close his warehouses, which infringed the Chinese ban on opium. That helped trigger the first opium war, which ended in August 1842 with the unequal treaty of Nanking.

 

After the second opium war (1856-60), the British and French imposed territorial concessions under foreign administration, the opening of Chinese ports to foreign trade and the legalisation of the opium trade. When Sutherland began the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the conflict had been over for five years.

 

The Chinese characters in the transliteration of its name are auspicious, and can be understood to mean gathering wealth.
HSBC’s first wealth came from opium from India, and later Yunan in China.

 

Winston Churchill famously wrote that history is written by the victors, which might explain why so little attention is paid in Britain to the infamous Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, which saw the Brits using their superior naval power to open up ‘free trade’ with China. 

 

Opium — sourced initially from India — was by far and away the largest product traded by British merchants in return for Chinese silks, tea and porcelain.  Facing understandable resistance from Chinese Emperor Tao Kuang and Lin Tse-hsu, his governor-general of the Liang Hu vice-regency, who was determined to stifle opium trade in his province, the British merchants resorted to violence to destroy the Chinese ability to impose their own laws and social protections.

 

If you’re rusty in your history of Britain’s various wars of Imperial Rape, the Second Opium War was the one where Britain and other European powers basically slaughtered lots of Chinese people until they agreed to legalize the dope trade (much like they had done in the First Opium War, which ended in 1842).
Opium trading was crucial to the British economy at that time. 

Some have interpreted the Opium Wars as being primarily rooted in an ideological struggle between British economic liberals and Chinese protectionists

In light of the British addiction to Chinese exports . . .  opium was the only commodity that saved the British balance of payments with Asia from ruinous deficit.

 

The mid-century British merchants in China believed that a ‘just war’ should be fought to defend progress. In reality the British leaders of the opium trade through the 1830s and 1840s were far more interested in protecting their drug sales in order to fund lucrative retirement packages (one of their number, James Matheson, used such profits to buy a seat in Parliament and the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis).

 

For how much of the time since its inception has drugs money run through HSBC’s veins? You decide.

[HawkHybrid]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-27/computer-glitch-plaguing-etfs-unrelated-mondays-flash-crash-bny-swears

 

computer glitches are everywhere, especially during

times when the dow records a 1000 point drop.

that drop must have been due to take out so many

stop losses.

 

HH

[morezone]

These are the glitches we hear about because it affects Joe Public.  If they're anything like RBS, the whole computer system is hanging on by a thread.  The core system needs a complete overhaul.  For years they've been adding code here there and everywhere to add functionality.  Unfortunately, sometimes there are conflicts which causes problems.  They really need to build a new system from the ground up and migrate everything over.  I doubt it would ever happen due to the cost and disruption.  I can see it all coming crashing down some day.

[BaldyBob]

All my payments went out fine from the business account. As did an additional BACS payment.

 

Media hype?

Either way, if anyone would like to show me a squeaky clean ethical  international bank I should be using please do 

[silversword]

All my payments went out fine from the business account. As did an additional BACS payment.

 

 

Faster payments were unaffected, and HSBC were manually clearing smaller payments under £100,000 (from what I am told), which is all very well for most users. My business was left waiting on about £400k from two clients because they were sending large amounts however. For a BACS instruction for wages from a medium-size company, even if the constituent payments are small the batch can easily be over £100k and suddenly lots of people aren't getting paid on time, and right before a bank holiday too.

 

Quite suspicious though how this happens to HSBC one week, and happened to Lloyds a few weeks prior - albeit with no media fanfare in the case of the latter.