Almost two years after the emergency merger of Credit Suisse and UBS, the parliamentary commission of inquiry responsible for analyzing how the Swiss authorities managed the crisis issued its report in December 2024. Point J takes stock of the lessons that can be learned from the Credit Suisse debacle.
In March 2023, the Swiss authorities participated in the implementation of an emergency merger between UBS and Credit Suisse, while the latter was in turmoil. After a succession of problems, the fall of the second largest Swiss bank seemed, at this time, to be accelerating. The merger, facilitated by the Federal Council, was intended in particular to avoid excessive destabilization of the financial markets.
Following the Credit Suisse disaster, a parliamentary commission of inquiry (CEP) was set up, with the mission of analyzing how the Swiss authorities managed this crisis and the merger between Credit Suisse and UBS. In its report, delivered in December 2024, the CEP does not point the finger at any particular person responsible, as explained by Mathilde Farine, economic journalist at RTS who wrote The Fall – Chronicle of the debacle of a bank (Slatkine editions, 2023)
We have the feeling of a system that has completely malfunctioned, information that has not circulated. But we do not have a person who has been identified as someone who committed a mistake
The responsibilities of several Swiss authorities are studied in the CEP report. The latter deplores in particular “the partial ineffectiveness of the supervisory activity” of FINMA, the Federal Financial Market Supervisory Authority. While noting that this authority “exercised its surveillance activity intensively”, the CEP considers, in a press release of December 20, 2024, that this surveillance activity “had only a limited effect: despite numerous enforcement procedures and warnings from FINMA, Credit Suisse has had one scandal after another.
According to the CEP report, Swiss politicians showed a certain laxity regarding the regulation of large banks, starting in 2015. Consequence: “When the Credit Suisse crisis worsened in the fall 2022, then in spring 2023, the Swiss authorities lacked important instruments, while other legal orders had had them for several years already,” indicates the CEP report.
On the other hand, the report indicates that the authorities showed a certain anticipation, in particular by working on different scenarios. “There is not only this scenario of a takeover by UBS, but also the scenario of a nationalization, the scenario of a liquidation, the scenario of a takeover by a company, a foreign bank, there are a lot of things that were put on the table”, explains Mathilde Farine.
-What are the shortcomings noted by the parliamentary commission of inquiry? What are its recommendations? Can systemic banks operate without risk?
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Grégoire Molle and the Point J team
