‘Buck stops with me,’ says HSBC boss

Michael Geoghegan, chief executive of HSBC, the UK’s biggest bank, is taking personal responsibility for a growing problem in the bank’s US mortgage business which has forced analysts to cut their profit forecasts by as much as 10%.

“The buck stops with me,” Mr Geoghegan said today, after the bank issued an unprecedented overnight warning about the state of its US business.
The bank, the third largest in the world, had already raised the issues with its US operations twice. But last night’s profits warning showed the situation is deteriorating even more severely, and that provisions against customers who are failing to repay their loans will be substantially higher than feared.

Banking analysts had been forecasting provisions of $8.8bn (