HSBC CEO Michael Geoghegan isn’t just furniture shopping for the big move back to Hong Kong.

The Wall Street Journal reports HSBC is in “advanced discussions” to acquire Royal Bank of Scotland’s banking assets in three Asian countries. The talks concern RBS’s retail and commercial banking assets in China, India and Malaysia, according to the report, which cited a person familiar with the situation.

In late September, HSBC decided to return its CEO to the place of the bank’s birth 144 years ago, as it refocuses on Asia. Europe’s biggest bank said it would stay based in London for tax purposes and had no plans to move, and Britain’s Financial Services Authority will remain its lead regulator. After the drama of Britain’s 1997 retreat from its lucrative colony, there are clearly still limits on just how Asian HSBC wants to be.

But it is also clear this is a buyer’s market for banking assets, not just in Asia but around the world. On Sunday we reported that Standard Chartered’s talks to buy the RBS assets had collapsed over differences on valuation. One person familiar with the matter said Standard Chartered had been willing to pay about $200 million but RBS wanted more.

  By Neil Chatterjee
    The U.S. has promised it will hunt down tax evaders.
    And it seems tax evaders are on the run.
    DBS bank, based in the growing offshore financial centre of
Singapore, told Reuters it had been approached by U.S. citizens
asking for its private banking services. But when told they would
have to sign U.S. tax declaration forms, the potential clients
disappeared.  
    Swiss banks also approached DBS on the hope they could
offload troublesome U.S. clients to a location that so far has
not been reached by the strong arms of Washington or Brussels.
    DBS said no thanks. In fact many private banks and boutique
advisors now seem to be avoiding U.S. clients.
    Will this spread to other nationalities, as governments
invest in tax spies and tax havens invest in white paint?
    Is this the end of offshore private private banking?

Julius Baer will buy ING’s private bank in Switzerland, the two have said (Reuters has long been reporting that Baer was the frontrunner to seal the deal).

The battle for Dutch retailer Super de Boer heats up, with Ahold now showing interest to buy 30 to 50 of its supermarkets. For these and other stories about deals, click here.

And two deal stories in other media:

Citigroup is working on a sale of its commodities unit Phibro in a move that could raise hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the Financial Times.

HSBC would be forced to delay raising its dividend if new capital rules are applied too heavily or too quickly, The Times reports the bank’s head of investment banking as saying.

The financial crisis has made the world less focused on the U.S., which will have to face up to the fact that it is not as significant as before, Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein told a large audience at the World Business Forum in New York:

“After World War II we were 48 percent of the world’s GDP; now we are about 20 percent of the world’s GDP… We have to get used to the fact that the dollar is relatively cheap and … that the dollar is probably not going to be the reserve currency that it’s been for so many years.”

Rubenstein said the center of the financial world won’t just be New York, but spread between here, London, Shanghai, Dubai, Sao Paulo and a few other cities.

Rubenstein concentrated particularly on the U.S. economy’s problems, listing issues such as the deficit, inflation, taxes and employment. He said that the U.S. is about two years into the recession and probably has a “month or two to go.”

He listed the areas he thinks are attractive investment opportunities: distressed investing, companies getting support from the U.S. government, energy (both carbon and alternative),  healthcare and emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil.

Among the final tidbits of advice that the private equity chief shot at the audience was to avoid excessive leverage:

“What we learned out of this most recent recession is if you borrow a lot of money it comes home to roost, so I’d avoid leverage–even normal leverage can be very dangerous at times when the economy goes down.”