As tensions rise between east and west, will HSBC be torn apart?

theguardian.com:

When Mark Tucker arrived as HSBC’s new chairman on a cloudy London day in October 2017, he was prepared for a challenge. The former insurance boss was the first outsider to lead the now 157-year-old bank, which was in the middle of a period of intense upheaval. HSBC was slimming down its investment bank, selling poorly performing businesses and slashing thousands of jobs as it tried to adapt to the post-financial-crisis era.

While Tucker was well equipped to guide the lender through that period of turmoil, he must now wrestle with a far bigger existential question – should the bank be broken up?

He has form on handling such decisions: as head of insurer Prudential in the late 2000s, he withstood calls for splitting the weaker UK business away from its more lucrative Asian operations, which made up more than half of profits from new business.

Yet his resistance there ultimately proved futile. Prudential eventually did split – albeit nearly a decade after Tucker’s departure.

A similar dilemma now faces him at HSBC, after its largest investor, the Chinese insurance group Ping An, revived calls to separate the bank’s profitable Asian business from the rest of the lender’s operations.

HSBC’s Scottish founder, Sir Thomas Sutherland, envisioned a Hong Kong-based lender that would finance trade between Europe and Asia when he launched the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in 1865. But the bank’s successes have largely mirrored the rise of globalisation, having splashed cash on a string of acquisitions since the 1970s – including Britain’s Midland Bank in 1992 – as international business boomed.

By the 2008 financial crisis – by which time HSBC had a presence in 86 countries and had long since shifted its headquarters to