Consumer and small-business loans would account for roughly 60% of the merged bank's domestic total, about the same as at Mizuho and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, the other big-four bank.
ECONOMIST: Will a mega-merger mark the end of Japan's banking crisis?
Of the big four, China Construction Bank is in the best shape.
Shares in Australia's big four banks also advanced, with Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank, ANZ and Westpac up between 0.3% and 1.2%.
The Bank of China, the least bad of the country's four big banks, expects that in five years' time consumers will account for half of the bank's loans.
Monday's results make HSBC the second-most-profitable bank among Britain's four big lenders in 2009.
Canada's banking system, essentially made up of the Royal Bank of Canada and four other big banks, remained strong during the global credit crisis.
The interesting part about recruiting in this area is that the four big firms (Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, UBS and Wells Fargo) spend obscene amounts of money to poach employees from one another.
No outsider knows the percentages of non-performing loans at the big four banks of China, including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank.
Yet the merger makes sense, in an industry dominated by the 27 big state banks, which together own four-fifths of bank assets and pocket 70% of the profits.
Bank of America, along with two of its big four rivals, also pointed to income from investment banking as a positive contribution to earnings.
Bank of China, the first of China's Big Four banks to report half-year profits, also warned that international markets remained "sharply precarious".
Four big universal financial groups, created from the merger of six keiretsu into three, together with a regional bank alliance.
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