Credit Default Swaps Blow Out on Credit Suisse as its Stock Price Hits an All-Time Low of $2.82

[Gunnar Larson]

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/12/credit-default-swaps-blow-out-on-credit-suisse-as-its-stock-price-hits-an-all-time-low-of-2-82/


By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 1, 2022 ~

Credit Suisse That $4 billion capital raise that was supposed to shore up
confidence in global banking behemoth Credit Suisse turns out to have been
too little, too late. Yesterday, 5-year Credit Default Swaps (CDS) on
Credit Suisse blew out to 446 basis points. That’s up from 55 basis points
in January and more than five times where CDS on its peer Swiss bank, UBS,
are trading.

The price of a Credit Default Swap reflects the cost of insuring oneself
against a debt default by the bank. Who might be desperate to buy
protection against a default by Credit Suisse and driving up the cost of
that protection? The mega banks on Wall Street that are counterparties to
its derivative trades come to mind, as well as hedge fund speculators.

Things don’t look any brighter this morning for Credit Suisse. Its shares
are trading in Europe at 2.67 Swiss Francs or approximately $2.82 – an
all-time low. Year-to-date, shares of Credit Suisse have lost 66 percent of
their value as of yesterday’s close on the New York Stock Exchange.

Credit Suisse is Switzerland’s second largest bank, after UBS. It has been
embroiled in nonstop scandals that suggest incompetent risk controls inside
the bank.

In late March and early April of last year, Credit Suisse lost $5.5 billion
from the highly-leveraged, highly concentrated stock positions it was
financing via tricked-up derivatives for Archegos Capital Management, the
family office hedge fund of Sung Kook “Bill” Hwang. Archegos blew up on
March 25, 2021 after it defaulted on margin calls to the banks financing
its trades. (See our report: Archegos: Wall Street Was Effectively Giving
85 Percent Margin Loans on Concentrated Stock Positions – Thwarting the
Fed’s Reg T and Its Own Margin Rules. Also see: Justice Department and SEC
Portray Serially-Charged Banks on Wall Street as Hapless Victims of
Archegos Fraud. Nobody’s Buying It.)

The Board of Credit Suisse decided to hire the Big Law firm, Paul, Weiss,
Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, to conduct an internal investigation of the
matter. On July 29, 2021 Paul Weiss issued a 165-page report on its version
of what happened. Paul Weiss generously found that no fraud had occurred —
just zombie risk management at a Global Systemically Important Bank (G-SIB).

This is how the Paul Weiss report portrayed the zombie risk managers at
Credit Suisse:

“The Archegos-related losses sustained by CS [Credit Suisse] are the result
of a fundamental failure of management and controls in CS’s Investment Bank
and, specifically, in its Prime Services business. The business was focused
on maximizing short-term profits and failed to rein in and, indeed, enabled
Archegos’s voracious risk-taking. There were numerous warning
signals—including large, persistent limit breaches — indicating that
Archegos’s concentrated, volatile, and severely under-margined swap
positions posed potentially catastrophic risk to CS. Yet the business, from
the in-business risk managers to the Global Head of Equities, as well as
the risk function, failed to heed these signs, despite evidence that some
individuals did raise concerns appropriately.”

And this:

“…a Prime Services business [lending to hedge funds] with a lackadaisical
attitude towards risk and risk discipline; a lack of accountability for
risk failures; risk systems that identified acute risks, which were
systematically ignored by business and risk personnel; and a cultural
unwillingness to engage in challenging discussions or to escalate matters
posing grave economic and reputational risk. The Archegos matter directly
calls into question the competence of the business and risk personnel who
had all the information necessary to appreciate the magnitude and urgency
of the Archegos risks, but failed at multiple junctures to take decisive
and urgent action to address them.”

Credit Suisse’s reputation took another hit from its involvement in the
Greensill Capital scandal and its infamous spy-gate scandal in 2019 where
the bank spied on, and followed, various employees.

And if all of this wasn’t enough, on November 2 S&P cut Credit Suisse’s
credit rating to one notch above junk. That was followed by more disturbing
news on November 23 when the bank reported that its clients had yanked
$88.3 billion of their assets out of the bank.

According to an historical timeline on the Credit Suisse website, it was
previously known as Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, which was eventually
shorted to SKA. The timeline notes that SKA’s New York Branch was granted a
license to accept deposits in 1964. Credit Suisse’s New York branch has
continued for decades to accept deposits, but they are not insured. In the
resolution plan for Credit Suisse that it filed with the Federal Reserve in
2020, it writes:

“Our New York Branch is not a member of, and its deposits are not insured
by, the FDIC. CS’ biggest U.S. presence is through its broker-dealer
related businesses. Typically broker-dealer activities are resolved with a
rapid runoff of the businesses as long as the resolution strategy is
supported by adequate operational capabilities, such as the ability to
transfer client accounts to peer institutions while causing minimal
disruptions to the broader financial markets.”

Wall Street trading houses accepting uninsured deposits resulted in the
banking crisis of the early 1930s when thousands of banks failed and people
rushed to pull their money from uninsured banks. Congress passed the 1933
Glass-Steagall Act banning the combination of investment banks/brokerage
firms with federally-insured banks. (Federal deposit insurance was also
created under the Glass-Steagall Act to restore confidence in the U.S.
banking system.) The Glass-Steagall Act served the nation well for 66 years
until its repeal under the Bill Clinton administration in 1999, allowing
trading firms to merge with federally-insured, deposit-taking banks. It
took just nine years without Glass-Steagall for Wall Street to collapse in
a replay of the crash of 1929.

Despite both Democrats and Republicans promising in their 2016 campaign
platforms to restore the Glass-Steagall Act, the idea quickly bit the dust
once the Trump administration took office. (See Mnuchin Says Trump
Administration Never Intended to Restore Glass-Steagall Act.) Instead of
Congress removing the Wall Street trading casino from the nation’s
federally-insured banks, Congress has sat back and allowed the crypto
circus to spread its risk directly into federally-insured banks.

It’s time for the American people to pick up the phone and demand better
from their elected members of Congress.

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