Easy come, easy go. Less than a week after HSBC said it would book a $2.6bn profit from the sale of its stake in insurer Ping An, the bank confirmed it is to pay a $1.9bn penalty to US authorities in relation to money-laundering lapses centred on its Mexican unit.
The settlement could knock about 11% off the bank's earnings for 2012. Yet the price of its Hong Kong-listed shares hardly budged Tuesday.
