HSBC: Money laundering and terrorism

HSBC is globalisation at its best and one of the best examples of the murky world of finance. For a bank that moved its headquarters to another country to avoid paying taxes in the United Kingdom, what has now been discovered is very much part of the same ethos. Having said that, corruption is one thing. Support for organized crime, murder and social degradation is a completely different cup of tea. What has happened raises very serious issues but the response to tackle those issues seems completely inadequate, unless you think that a few fines and a few words of contrition are enough to make us forget that for many years a banking institution knowingly supported drug trafficking and terrorism.