When historians look back 100 years from now to explain how capitalism went off the rails, Exhibit A will be a list of events from the past 20 years: the pump and dump of inflated dotcom shares in the 1990s before the bubble burst; hedge funds and spendthrift governments collapsing currencies and obliterating the savings of millions in the Asian financial crisis; Enron et al; rampant insider trading in markets everywhere; Wall Street bankers bringing the world to its knees in 2008-09, then making their shareholders pay billions to keep themselves out of prison; Libor cheats; foreign-currency cheats; tax cheats; and an oil market manipulation case currently winding its way through a New York court … It's easier than you think.

Another of these regular screwings of investors - dual-class shareholding structures - has crept into the United States markets and somehow, irrationally, the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing is feeling less competitive because it doesn't allow this particular kind of screwing - which it calls one of the "currently acceptable standards in the marketplace".