A hellfire sermon for HSBC’s boss

Matthew Lynn says shareholder activist Eric Knight is right to castigate HSBC’s strategy, and that the bank’s deeply religious chairman Stephen Green now faces a battle to hang on to his job

When he isn’t running the world’s second biggest bank, Stephen Green, the chairman of HSBC, is an ordained priest and amateur theologian. In 1996 he published Serving God? Serving Mammon? Christians and the Financial Markets, in which he explored whether you can do the Lord’s work whilst also commuting to Canary Wharf every morning to do battle in the boardroom and kick ass on the trading floor. ‘Christians can serve God in the world of finance and commerce, but it is also possible to fall into the trap of serving Mammon there,’ he wrote. ‘Yet the kingdom of God can be found in the thick of the markets.’

The trouble is that some investors and analysts — predictably, you might well argue — have been signalling that they would like a bit less theology and a bit more Mammon.