Why the World Should Care About Credit Suisse’s Downfall

Switzerland’s secret bank accounts and political neutrality turned the small Alpine nation into a financial giant. Now the demise of Credit Suisse, one of its two big banks, has shaken global finance and created a megabank in UBS that comes with new and potentially bigger risks. 

Bloomberg journalists trace the history of Swiss banking and how the ramifications of the Credit Suisse crisis extend far beyond the country’s borders.

`I've Got My Wizards Hat On' What Broker Said about Libor Moves

From Bloomberg Business -

“A former trader at UBS Group AG asked a broker at RP Martin Holdings Ltd. for help moving Libor because he’d "heard you knew magic."

Mirhat Alykulov, who worked with Tom Hayes at UBS in Tokyo, sent a message in February 2009 asking RP Martin’s Jim Gilmour for a higher six-month Libor rate. The message was shown to jurors by prosecutors at a trial of half a dozen brokers, including Gilmour, accused of helping Hayes manipulate benchmark rates.

"Yes I’ve got my wizards hat on today," Gilmour joked, after agreeing to try to push the rate higher.”

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Kweku Adoboli turns his hand to compliance training

From The Telegraph -

“Kweku Adoboli, the trader convicted of fraud after losing $2.3bn at UBS, is now speaking at compliance seminars for City workers and studying for a PhD, according to reports.

Adoboli was last week banned from financial work by the FCA, in what he said was "the closing of a difficult chapter for me". He is also fighting attempts to deport him to Ghana, where he was born but has not lived since he was four years old.

As a trader within UBS’s global synthetic equities team, Adoboli booked phantom trades to give the appearance of hedging his positions, leaving the bank unwittingly exposed to the full extent of his trading losses. He also hoarded profits from good trades to use later to cover losses on missteps.”

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So Tom Hayes Is Guilty. Who Else Is?

From Moyers & Company – 

“When people make that kind of money for the bank — in markets that are supposed to be highly competitive — executives don’t want to know too much about what they’re doing.

'Either Tom Hayes’s bosses at UBS and Citi knew what he was doing, in which case they are guilty as well. Or they didn’t know about a widespread conspiracy being conducted across the electronic communications systems of some of the most technologically sophisticated companies in the world, in which case they are recklessly incompetent.'

It’s hard to believe that senior executives at UBS and Citi didn’t know that LIBOR was being fixed. If they weren’t in on it directly, it’s likely that they turned a blind eye — precisely because they knew that it was good for the bottom line.”

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