Premature declarations of death are not uncommon in society. So it was for transatlantic banking, the primacy of western financial centres and the world as one knew it after the sub-prime cancer of 2008. This would be the time when such centres as Shanghai, Hong Kong, even Dubai, stood up to claim the global leadership that was rightfully theirs: the globe’s financial axis – not just its reservoirs of cash but the mechanics of where and how it was transacted internationally – would tilt.
But reports of Atlantic banking’s death, and of the eclipse of traditional financial centres, seem to have been greatly exaggerated.
Witness the recent refinancing of Naguib Sawiris’s Orascom Telecom mobile phone empire (see Orascom: A very modern tale of corporate finance, Euromoney, February 2011). Based...
