UBS

Thursday

Lionel Barber

The rotten core of Credit Suisse

The tale of Credit Suisse ought to be Buddenbrooks on steroids. A staid Swiss lender enters marriage with a racy Wall Street investment bank and gives birth to a monster. Scandal follows scandal. CEOs come and go. In March 2023, the bank ends up being flogged to its arch rival UBS for a miserly $3 billion. Inside Credit Suisse, the backstabbing and treachery were more suited to a medieval court Duncan Mavin is well placed to tell this corporate horror story, having written a book about one of Credit Suisse’s most notorious clients, Lex Greensill, an Australian melon farmer turned fintech champion. Greensill Capital, which employed David Cameron as a Whitehall lobbyist and international frontman, turned out to be a house of cards.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Credit Suisse lingers still. Why?

From our US edition

If G-SIBs were a gentlemen’s club rather than a category invented by the Basel-based Financial Stability Board, Credit Suisse would have been kicked down the front steps months ago. G-SIBs are the thirty "global systemically important banks" and even within that list, Credit Suisse counted among those with the lowest "required levels of addition capital buffers": in short, regulators considered it rock-solid. But that was a judgment on its end-2021 balance sheet, not its management. Credit Suisse has been so badly run for so long — so riven by tension between the dull Swiss wealth business it ought to have been and the global player it imagined itself to be — that some of us wondered how it survived.

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