Perhaps HSBC is only getting all this massive attention because the huge leak of confidential data came from someone working at that bank. What would we know if there was a similar data dump of the 100,000 largest customers at all the other Swiss banks?
That idea was prompted by this article:
2/28 – Reuters at Business Insider – Rival Swiss banker things everyone’s being too hard on HSBC and its money-laundering, tax-evasion scandal – Rueters article is here. A small rival to HSBC says they have actually done a better job at getting rid of shady clients that other banks. The euphemism is
…regularize its clients.
This banker says HSBC started earlier than the other Swiss banks at doing some cleanup.
The unsettling idea is maybe he is right.
Is it possible there are other banks that did more to help customers break laws in home countries and we just don’t know it because there hasn’t been a dump of details for the top 100,000 customers of any other banks?
The media pundits, hyperventilating politicians, and lynch-mob tweeters are behaving as if HSBC is the only bank that is glad to serve hundreds or thousands of known shady customers.
What if HSBC isn’t the messiest bank? What if all this attention is merely because we know what was going on in that one bank because that is where there was a huge data leak?