
Imperiled bank Credit Suisse was bought by Swiss banking giant UBS Sunday, hours before New York Community Bank announced plans to purchase Signature Bank. The purchases were meant to calm nervous depositors in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank’s demise earlier this month, but roiling markets on Monday were a reminder that there’s still a lot of uncertainty about whether the banking crisis can be contained.
The good news is that the main factors that brought Credit Suisse to the precipice of collapse don’t seem to be a direct result of the crisis that ended Signature and Silicon Valley Bank, suggesting that other large banks probably aren’t as vulnerable as smaller, regional banks in the US. (Disclosure: Vox Media, which owns Vox, banked with SVB before its closure.)
“Every couple of months, there has been a rumor that Credit Suisse was in trouble and going to go under,” said Itamar Drechsler, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “I don’t think it’s directly a result of [the current crisis.]”
Credit Suisse has been wracked with scandals and major financial losses over the last few years. In 2020, top executives at the bank resigned over a spying scandal targeting its former wealth management head, and last year, a court found that the bank failed to prevent money laundering by a Bulgarian cocaine trafficking gang. The bank also lost more than 7 billion Swiss francs in 2022, its biggest loss since 2008.