Any other business: Oh dear… perhaps Standard Chartered isn’t as dull as it looks

The cautionary tale of the Co-operative Bank, its black hole and its naughty chairman has recently taught us that if a financial institution has the reputation of being dull, earnest and set in its ways, it probably isn’t. The collapse last year of Switzerland’s oldest private bank, Wegelin & Co — whose boss once claimed that being small and provincial made it ‘easy to avoid the deadly emotions of greed and fear’ — was another example.