Risk appetite

HSBC bank has written to Finsbury Park Mosque and other Muslim organisations in the UK to tell them that their accounts will be closed.

The reason given in some cases was that to continue providing services would be outside the bank's "risk appetite".

The story is reported here on the BBC News website

Let's savour and celebrate that marvellous neologism 'risk appetite'. HSBC used to have a bulimic appetite for risk and was fined nearly $2 billion in 2012 for its poor management of money-laundering. I'm all for making things difficult for (say) the hate preachers who were involved in goings on at the Finsbury park Mosque (and would happily endorse any legal sequestration of the assets of Abu Hamza, the Egyptian cleric currently awaiting a sentence in the States). But it seems to me that when high street banks start using language like 'risk appetite' we should all brace ourselves. Or at least those of us with permanent overdrafts.