Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

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I also glimpsed some of the hangovers from China's traumatic past. When five US guided bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Balkans conflict in 1999, people were quickly whipped up into a nationalistic frenzy. US authorities claimed that this incident, in which three Chinese citizens were killed, was due to a CIA mistake. China has never accepted this explanation. In the days that followed, angry crowds demonstrated outside the US embassy. One evening shortly afterwards, I was out with a friend from Korea. Conversing in English, we were mistaken for Americans and chased after by a mob. That certainly left an impression on me that populist nationalism is a pretty scary thing.

On completing university, I joined the graduate programme of an American investment bank in London. I rapidly specialised in advising financial services clients and learned top-down and bottom-up about the international financial system.

For almost a decade until mid-2021, I worked at the centre of Hong Kong's financial markets at Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX). HKEX is the sole exchange and clearing house operator in the most successful initial public offerings (IPOs) market in the world. I landed there because, back in early 2012, I found myself between jobs with time on my hands. A social acquaintance who was running Business Development for HKEX at the time asked if I might come and help out on a corporate takeover the Exchange was contemplating. I had been due to join another investment bank several months later and my wife told me I should just relax and enjoy my time off. However, although I had previously worked on transactions involving banks, insurers and asset managers, I had never seriously looked at how exchanges work, and curiosity got the better of me. The transaction turned out to be the competitive auction for the London Metal Exchange (LME), the world's leading venue for trading industrial metals, with a history tracing back over four centuries.