It is a measure of the severity of the crisis that HSBC executives talk of “signature financial strength” with a straight face. This is a bank that has just relieved shareholders of $17.8bn in Britain's biggest rights issue and lost $23bn in its US consumer finance arm in 2007 and 2008. It yesterday invited shareholders to celebrate the fact that HSBC Finance's first-quarter losses, excluding gains and losses on its own debt, were about 9 per cent better than the fourth quarter. (Never mind that this quarter's loss, of $3.4bn, was five times wider than that of the same period last year.)

You'd expect a bank known as the Big Elephant to have a thick hide. That is why its strategy is to tough it out. With the HSBC Finance mortgage book now in run-off, investors seem set to shrug off further deterioration in the assets. Yesterday's only slight slip in the shares suggests reluctance to abandon a stock with a prospective yield of above 4 per cent. The global banking and markets business, meanwhile, is beginning to profit at the expense of weakened rivals; HSBC's top ranking in underwriting euromarket bonds this year, for example, is unfamiliar territory. And at some point, as China keeps hinting, the bank will surely be rewarded for not plundering its basket of investments in the country.

But in the background, of course, there is no shortage of nasties. Loan impairment charges and other credit risk provisions rose in every territory. The vast, $52bn available-for-sale, asset-backed securities portfolio is only slowly coming down. And the first quarter's big reduction in US credit card and mortgage assets looks unrepeatable as it was almost certainly flattered by consumers using tax rebates to pay down debt. No wonder that the bank poured cold water on acquisition rumours; having raised that capital, it would be mad to start chucking it away.