Group Chairman, HSBC Rebuilding trust will not be the work of a moment, says the Group Chairman of HSBC. It requires a new emphasis on values within corporations, so as to buttress the regulatory environment.
We are in the midst of the worst financial and economic crisis since 1929. Thanks to the timely action of governments around the world we have so far avoided meltdown. But the challenge for everyone – politicians, central banks, regulators and financial institutions – is to work wholeheartedly to avoid turning the worldwide recession into a full-blown depression. Keynes is enjoying a remarkable renaissance and the case for pump priming the economy in the short term is, in my view, compelling. At the same time, banks have an important role to play. They must continue to lend – to lend responsibly – and reassert their determination to operate on the basis of prudent and sustainable relationships with their corporate and individual customers.
Once the worst has passed – and I am confident that the actions taken so far are pushing us in the right direction – there must be no return to the status quo ante. In the longer term (say over the next two to three years) the imperative for policymakers, banks and businesses is to correct the global imbalances that have built up as a result of the major economic shift that has been taking place – and will continue to take place – toward emerging markets. Added to this, the excessive leverage that built up over many years in the financial system, and the misalignment of incentives (both market incentives and compensation incentives that created excessive risk and short-termism, in other words), must be reversed.
There are many lessons we should learn from this crisis – not just for banks but for regulators, ratings agencies, investors and borrowers. Banks became over-geared and too dependent on wholesale funding. Regulators did not pay enough attention to liquidity management in the banks. Ratings agencies were too ready to work with structured product innovators to help achieve high ratings, which, as it turned out, did not stand the test of illiquidity. Investors chased yield and forgot the “too good to be true test”. And borrowers too often succumbed to the temptations of jam today, which was proffered too freely by lenders.
However, we should be careful not to draw the wrong conclusions from what has happened. It is neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back and to do without capital markets or securitization. It is neither possible nor desirable to return to the days when all financial intermediation was carried out through banks’ balance sheets. That is intrinsically inefficient in a modern economy. Capital markets are the crossroads of capitalism, where the providers and users of finance come together. And as capital markets today are borderless, we need to accept that national economies are inextricably interdependent.