A not-so-secret code for cities

Hong Kong and the City of London are facing existential threats as global financial centres - but what made them great in the first place?

What strange alchemy turns a city into an “international financial centre”? Many of those who study the Asia Pacific economy are thinking particularly hard about this question at the moment, thanks to President Xi Jinping. The People’s Republic of China has, as all agree, taken a particularly aggressive and authoritarian turn under Mr Xi, even to the extent of harming its own interests. And the latest iteration of this blundering is the new national security rules to be applied to Hong Kong. (I shall not call it a “law”, as many in the media seem to thoughtlessly do, since it