British banks "shamed" by US regulators

Even more to shout about Occupy protesters outside HSBC's iconic headquarters earlier this year

One of the distinctive features of HSBC’s landmark headquarters in Hong Kong, designed by celebrated British architect Norman Foster, is its lack of visible internal supporting structure. That doesn’t seem too dissimilar to HSBC’s corporate structure given July’s US Senate report claiming the bank was complicit as a conduit for money laundering by Mexican drug cartels and that it failed to turn away clients with alleged ties to terrorism.

Attention is also now focusing on Standard Chartered, another British bank with a strong...