Stephen and Stitt — the iconic HSBC Holdings Plc lions — are crouching and ready to pounce. Adjusted profit from Asian operations jumped 8.5 percent from a year earlier to $4.76 billion in the first-quarter results showed last week. That’s even as ho-hum performance everywhere else dragged down return on equity to an annualized rate of 7.5 percent, a drop ...

A friend of mine who is a bit of a climate-change skeptic once challenged me with this question: If climate change is such a pressing danger, why haven’t coastal real estate prices crashed? It’s a fair question. If financial markets are even close to efficient, and if everyone knows climate change is about to flood the coasts, then it stands ...

Bloomberg For years, Asia’s biggest private banks have been on a hiring spree to keep pace with the ranks of newly minted millionaires. Now, they’re squeezing more out of their bankers. Relationship managers who cater to wealthy clients in the region are running larger pools of money, with average assets run by each surging to an all-time high of $341 ...