19 March 2023: UBS rescues Credit Suisse
After a crisis of confidence and deposit outflows, Swiss authorities brokered a takeover of Credit Suisse by rival UBS for about 3 billion Swiss francs, a fraction of its former value. In a controversial twist, about $17 billion of the bank's AT1 bonds were wiped out entirely while shareholders got something. A 167-year-old institution vanished over a weekend. Being too big to fail does not mean too big to disappear.
The lesson: Read the fine print on complex securities; in a crisis, the legal hierarchy can surprise you.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Credit Suisse at the start of 2020 → $61.54 today, vs $2,092 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2020, the latest year on the wheel. That is a loss of $938, while a plain index fund over the same years made $1,092.
What Credit Suisse teaches: Repeated risk-management failures are a pattern rather than bad luck, and a bank's reputation can collapse long before its balance sheet visibly does.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $24.00 | $33.33 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $18.00 | $44.44 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $13.00 | $61.54 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Credit Suisse? Every starting year and the full story →
More Credit Suisse history
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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