It is understandable that the European Commission wants more women on company boards; western European banks are among the worst in the world for gender equality in the executive suite.

The leading Japanese banks have performed solidly over the past year, showing an impressive resilience in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country in March 2011. However, return-on-asset levels are still worryingly low.

The gap between New York in first place and London in second has widened in The Banker's IFC rankings, while Amsterdam and Chicago show the greatest improvement on the 2011 list.

The decline of Japan’s banking sector in the 1990s may provide some indication of how European bank deleveraging will unfold over the next few years.

Beijing boasts the highest levels of asset values for IFCs among local players, but it is Hong Kong that ranks top in volumes of foreign-owned subsidiaries' assets, and it remains the go-to Asian financial centre for foreign businesses.

In the regulatory rush to strengthen Tier 1 capital, banks that seek to optimise their total capital structure have become an endangered species. But one region has rediscovered Tier 2 capital.

The Banker cannot predict which banks will turn out to be involved in the Libor scandal, but we can identify the banks where traders wield the most revenue-generating power.

Profits for the banking sectors in most European countries fell in 2011, in some cases catastrophically. But there were a few countries that managed to buck the trend.