NO ONE can deny that United Overseas Bank's low-key chief executive Wee Ee Cheong hasn't got a sense of humour.
Last month, he told analysts and reporters at the bank's full-year results briefing that UOB management "had gone through many, many stress tests on its loans book, so much so they were stressed" too.
I am reminded of his observation as I watch Wall Street traders' schizophrenic behaviour over financial stocks since Monday.
What is spooking them is US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's so-called stress tests on the 19 largest US banks.
They are so stressed over the results of the stress tests, due to be released on May 4, that the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 4 per cent on Monday before recovering 1.6 per cent on Tuesday.
Plenty of cynicism is surrounding these tests. One US writer notes that no matter how the results pan out, US banks will come out smelling like flowers.
"If every bank passes this test, what will the US government have proven? And should the Treasury report that some banks failed this test, they will be gone quicker than you can say bailout," he wrote.
Some traders said that Wall Street's Monday selldown was partly due to an unsubstantiated report by a US station that 16 of the 19 banks failed the tests and would need massive cash infusion from the US government.
And while US financial stocks were regaining their poise on the stock market Tuesday after Monday's sell-down, it was a very different story in the derivatives market where the costs of protecting US banks against default had risen sharply.
It seems like investors are not taking any chances, even as Citigroup chief executive Vikram Pandit was reassuring shareholders at its AGM that the banking giant would repay the US government "every dollar with interest".
All these concerns must have found their way to Asian markets today, as they continue to decline, despite Wall Street’s rebound.
As I write, Hong Kong's Hang Seng is down 1.6 per cent while Tokyo's Nikkei-225 Index is almost flat, after giving up its 1 per cent gain in the morning.
Singapore' Straits Times Index is down a staggering 49 points, or 2.6 per cent.
The index had been artificially propped up at the close yesterday by a 23 per cent surge in Jardine Matheson share price and is suffering a bigger downswing than other regional indexes as the stock moves back to its average trading price.