The end of Credit Suisse
Zurich, Bern
Key figures: Karin Keller-Sutter, Alain Berset
HLS (German): Credit Suisse
Alfred Escher’s bank. The Schweizerische Kreditanstalt is founded in Zurich in 1856 to finance the railways, on the initiative of Alfred Escher, the same man who promoted the Gotthard tunnel (see the 1882 stage), and soon becomes Switzerland’s largest commercial bank. For more than a century and a half it is, with UBS, the symbol of the financial centre.
Years of scandals. From 2020 the bank piles up losses and scandals: the collapse of the Greensill funds and of the Archegos fund in 2021, fines and trials. In October 2022 and again in March 2023, as some regional banks fail in the United States, clients withdraw billions in deposits.
The weekend of 19 March 2023. On Sunday 19 March the Federal Council announces that UBS is buying Credit Suisse for 3 billion francs. It uses emergency law to do so, without a shareholder vote: the Confederation guarantees UBS up to 9 billion in losses, beyond the first 5 borne by UBS, and guarantees National Bank liquidity loans of up to 100 billion. Credit Suisse’s AT1 bonds, about 16 billion, are written off. In April the National Council, in an extraordinary session, refuses in protest to approve the 109 billion in credits after the fact.
The consequences. UBS gives up the federal guarantee on 11 August 2023, at no loss to the state. On 20 December 2024 a parliamentary commission of inquiry publishes its report: it finds the solution appropriate but points to the limits of the “too big to fail” rules. In October 2025 the Federal Administrative Court rules that the AT1 write-off had no legal basis; the case goes to the Federal Supreme Court. With only one big bank left, parliament debates new capital requirements.
The Credit Suisse headquarters on Paradeplatz in Zurich, 2015
Photo Ank Kumar, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The Credit Suisse headquarters on Paradeplatz, Zurich, 2013
Photo Thomas Wolf, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 de