There was a time not that long ago when foreign banks in China were prospering in spite of the growing tensions between Beijing and the west. The beginnings of today’s hostile geopolitics had come to the fore by the autumn of 2020 — the language of decoupling and cold war II had been forged. Yet the financial services and professional services sectors had seemed strangely immune to the new permafrost.

That exceptionalism is now clearly waning, US officials and bankers say. The clearest evidence has been the freezing out of US consultancies, in particular the April raid on Bain & Company.

It is surprising that this hasn’t happened sooner. Ever since sanctions were imposed on Russia after the country’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian banks were frozen out of dollar-based international financial markets. The backlash has seen large parts of the world become increasingly angry about the weaponisation of the dollar. China and other Brics countries have been explicit about wanting to challenge dollar supremacy.