Stuart Gulliver is the man who led one of the swiftest and most sustained profit increases in HSBC's 145-year history. And it is a feat he performed in Asia, against the backdrop of a debilitating regional meltdown, while head of treasury and capital markets from 1994 to 2002.
That experience has served the bank well ever since. If any bank can claim to have sailed through the global financial crisis relatively intact, it is HSBC. The bank has not been censured by the regulators it has not been bailed out with one dollar of government funding and, most uniquely of all, its strategy and ethos has not been...