There's a joke going round HSBC's Canary Wharf headquarters that it is changing its advertising slogan from "HSBC: the world's local bank", to "HSBC: the world's only bank". Things haven't gone quite that far yet, thank goodness, but HSBC is keen to distance itself from its peers.
It issued a wonderfully understated release saying it has injected £750m of equity into its UK subsidiary from its own resources, and that it has no plans to use the government's recapitalisation initiative - not only that, but it is providing liquidity to support the London interbank market.
With hindsight, HSBC's problems in the US, disclosed at the end of 2006, should have acted as a bigger early warning signal of the tumult to come.
It has been writing off billions of dollars on bad loans in its US subsidiary and its shares have been hit on fears that its Asian operations will be hammered as the slump spreads, so I'm sure its combative chief executive Mike Geoghegan is not feeling remotely smug. But at least he can tell his critics, including shareholder activists Knight Vinke, that things could have been a lot, lot worse.
So it can't afford to feel totally smug.
