We hear that Bloomberg is paying the price for its examination, two months ago, of the wealth of the extended family of Xi Jinping, the man expected to be China's next president. None of the assets, which ran into hundreds of millions of US dollars, were linked to Xi, his wife or his daughter.
Most, according to Bloomberg, were owned by Xi's older sister, Qi Qiaoqiao, her husband, Deng Jiagui, and Qi's daughter, Zhang Yannan. Bloomberg was careful to say in its story: "There is no indication Xi intervened to advance his relatives' business transactions, or of any wrongdoing by Xi or his extended family."
However these precautionary words do not appear to have saved Bloomberg from retribution.
The company derives most of its income from selling data via its Bloomberg terminals. However, we have heard that several of the company's salespeople in Hong Kong have found it virtually impossible to sell new terminal services to mainland financial institutions, particularly the banks, and that some of these institutions have been reducing the number of terminals they use, quite sharply in some cases.
This has led some people to conclude that this apparent decline in interest on the part of the banks is related to Bloomberg's recent story.
Bloomberg is not alone in copping this kind of reaction. In a study published in October 2010, Andreas Fuchs and Nils-Hendrik Klann of the University of Gottingen in Germany tracked the international movements of the Dalai Lama since 2002. After stripping out the impact of other influences, such as the world trade cycle, they found that, on average, countries whose senior government ministers held official meetings with the Dalai Lama suffered a 12.5 per cent fall in exports to China the following year. This is an effect that generally lasts for two years.