Meltdown: Greed, Scandal and the Collapse of Credit Suisse
Closest book coverage: Archegos as the loss that broke Credit Suisse.
Summary
Mavin, a financial journalist, traces Credit Suisse from its nineteenth-century founding through the sequence of scandals and losses that ended with its emergency sale to UBS in March 2023.
The sequence is the argument. Mavin covers the bank's history of accommodating questionable clients, the Chiasso affair of the 1970s, the Mozambique tuna bond fraud, the assistance to American tax evaders that produced a criminal plea, the corporate espionage scandal in which the bank surveilled its own departing executives, the Greensill supply chain funds that collapsed and cost clients billions, and the Archegos family office losses of more than five billion dollars from a single counterparty.
His explanation is cultural and structural. The bank repeatedly chose revenue over control, punished the risk and compliance functions that raised objections, retained senior people after failures, and treated fines as a cost of business. The investment bank pursued growth with a risk appetite the group's capital could not support, while the wealth management business supplied the reputation that made the funding possible. When both Archegos and Greensill hit within weeks, the reputational damage reached the depositors, and outflows in late 2022 removed the funding base.
The book is recent journalism and Mavin had good access to former employees. It is a narrative of failures rather than an analytical account of Swiss banking regulation or of the resolution mechanics, and readers wanting those will need other sources. The pattern it documents, that repeated tolerated failures compound into an institution nobody trusts, is the durable point.
Key takeaways 7
- Credit Suisse failed after decades of choosing revenue over control, with each scandal treated as an isolated incident rather than as evidence of the same defect.
- Risk and compliance functions that raised objections were overruled or removed, which meant the same failures recurred with different counterparties.
- The Archegos loss of more than five billion dollars came from a single counterparty whose concentration and leverage the bank had not measured.
- The Greensill supply chain funds were sold to clients as low-risk while carrying concentrated exposure to a single borrower group.
- Fines were absorbed as a cost of business rather than treated as evidence that the business model required change.
- A bank's wealth management franchise supplies the deposit funding that an investment bank's risk-taking depends on, which connects the two businesses whatever the internal structure says.
- Depositor confidence, once lost, moves faster than any capital position can support, and the 2022 outflows determined the outcome before the resolution.
Who should read it
Investors and risk professionals studying how repeated tolerated control failures compound into institutional collapse.
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