Word: greenes
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...Green initiatives. They're tricky things: entirely noble and admirable in concept, but complete nuisances when brought from abstraction to reality. For example, when the Winthrop House REP tells you that she has some "exciting green news," you know you've got to brace yourself. Because now you're only going to have one napkin dispenser on each table in Winthrop...
...have to be kidding me. This is everything that is wrong with the green initiatives in the house. Will making it annoyingly hard for me to clean the sauce off my mouth save a napkin or two? Maybe. Will it be hugely inconvenient and only save resources through impractical methods...
Holiday Inn hopes travelers will be won over by all its new goodies: a cheerful but "kept-real" greeting as part of a new staff-training program, the scent of green tea and ginger in the lobby (as opposed to chlorine from the pool) and a sound track that includes Sting and Bruce Springsteen. And when you step into that room - surprise - a pillow-top mattress with crisp white triple sheeting, a flat-screen television, a bright bathroom with a starched shower curtain and upgraded amenities from Bath & Body Works. Stuff you'd expect to find at higher-priced outfits...
...proved disastrous. For the 18 months ending in June, HSBC's U.S. personal-financial-services business posted pretax losses of $20 billion. In March, HSBC announced its consumer-finance operation wouldn't issue any more loans and would begin winding down its business (except for credit cards). Chairman Stephen Green said in a statement at the time that the Household purchase was one "we wish we had not undertaken." (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...HSBC isn't completely turning its back on the West. Green, the chairman, will remain in London, as will HSBC's official world headquarters. Yet HSBC's return to Asia is still an important signal of where the bank and the world economy believes it will find new growth. "The self-styled 'world's local bank' is realizing some locales are more important than others," noted an editorial in the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's largest English-language newspaper. "It has taken an extraordinary financial crisis for the bank to see that its future lies where its roots...