Why was Credit Suisse allowed to linger for so long?

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 30 ‘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. ‘Pour encourager les autres,’ I wrote 18 months ago, wouldn’t it be better ‘to move the depositors to a safer bank and close the repeat offender down’?

That’s pretty much what happened in the forced merger with UBS last weekend.