Lord Green must answer for HSBC’s sins – but maybe it was always too big to manage

Stephen Green — the former trade minister Lord Green of Hurstpier-point, who became this week’s political punchbag— was always a rather Olympian, out-of-the-ordinary figure at HSBC.

This was a bank that traditionally drew its top men from a corps of tough, non-intellectual, front-line overseas bankers typified by the chairmen before Green, Sir John Bond and Sir Willie Purves. As the dominant bank in Hong Kong and a market leader throughout Asia and the Middle East, it was habituated to dealing with customers who took big risks, hoarded cash when they had it, and did not necessarily regard paying tax as a civic duty. But if ethics were rarely discussed in HSBC dining rooms, they were robustly applied — by weeding out bad borrowers and unreliable managers, who moved on to make trouble for lesser banks seeking to compete on HSBC’s patch. That strength of grip enabled HSBC to become the world’s ‘local bank’ (a slogan it dropped in 2011) and second-largest financial colossus.