The Guardian view on HSBC: a bank beyond shame
‘On banking, the Conservative manifesto had it right: “Hardworking taxpayers supported the banks during the financial crisis and so the banks should in turn support them during the recovery.” Bankers got rich playing pass-the-parcel with debt, before it transpired that their game was pass-the-parcel-bomb.
Some of the banks were bought up outright by the public, but all relied on implicit guarantees and the liquidity that the state washed through the system. The wider consequences of their folly hardly need spelling out: suffice to say that with UK GDP per head still just below its pre-crisis peak, we’re talking seven lost years for Britain.
Contrition, therefore, remains the appropriate mood for the industry as a whole. That is triply true for HSBC, whose reputation has been tainted thrice over since the crisis: first there was the laundering of Mexican drug money, next came massive compensation for PPI mis-selling, and then, most recently, revelations about the Swiss subsidiary’s industrial-scale efforts to cheat the public coffers, by facilitating tax avoidance and even evasion by wealthy clients.’
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