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Credit Suisse

How Credit Suisse Became a Meme Stock

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“Credit Suisse is probably going bankrupt.”

It was Saturday, Oct. 1, and Jim Lewis, who frequently posts on Twitter under the moniker Wall Street Silver, made that assertion to his more than 300,000 followers. “Markets are saying it’s insolvent and probably bust. 2008 moment soon?”

Mr. Lewis was among hundreds of people — many of them amateur investors — who had been speculating about the fate of Credit Suisse, the Swiss bank. It was in the middle of a restructuring and had become an easy target after decades of scandals, failed attempts at reform and management upheavals.

There seemed to be no immediate provocation for Mr. Lewis’s weekend tweet other than a memo that Ulrich Körner, the chief executive of Credit Suisse, had sent employees the day before, reassuring them that the bank was in good financial health.

But the tweet, which has been liked more than 11,000 times and retweeted more than 3,000 times, was one of many that helped ignite a firestorm on social media forums like Twitter and Reddit. The rumor that Credit Suisse was in trouble ricocheted around the world, stumping bank executives and forcing them to call shareholders, trading partners and analysts to reassure them that everything was fine before markets reopened on Monday.

prop up the shares of GameStop, the video game retailer, determined to outsmart hedge funds that had bet the company’s shares would fall.

But what started as a spontaneous effort to take down Wall Street has since become an established presence in the market. Millions of amateur investors have embraced trading, including more sophisticated strategies such as shorting. As the Credit Suisse incident shows, their actions highlight a new source of peril for troubled companies.

Founded in Switzerland in 1856 to help finance the expansion of railroads in the tiny European nation, Credit Suisse has two main units — a private wealth management business and an investment bank. However, the bank has often struggled to maintain a pristine reputation.

It has been the repository of funds from businesspeople who are under sanctions, human rights abusers and intelligence officials. The U.S. government has fined it billions of dollars for its role in helping Americans file false tax returns, marketing mortgage-backed securities tied to the 2008 financial crisis and helping customers in Iran, Sudan and elsewhere breach U.S. sanctions.

In the United States, Credit Suisse built its investment banking business through acquisitions, starting with the 1990 purchase of First Boston. But without a core focus, the bank — whose top bosses sit in Switzerland — has often allowed mavericks to pursue new revenue streams and take outsize risks without adequate supervision.

collapsed. Credit Suisse was one of many Wall Street banks that traded with Archegos, the private investment firm of Bill Hwang, a former star money manager. Yet it lost $5.5 billion, far more than its rivals. The bank later admitted that a “fundamental failure of management and controls” had led to the debacle.

surveillance of Credit Suisse executives under his watch. He left the bank in a stable and profitable condition and invested appropriately across its various divisions, his spokesman, Andy Smith, said.

Credit Suisse replaced Mr. Thiam with Thomas Gottstein, a longtime bank executive. When Archegos collapsed, the bank kept Mr. Gottstein on the job, but he started working with a new chairman, António Horta-Osório, who had been appointed a few months earlier to restructure the bank.

resigned after an inquiry into whether he had broken quarantine rules during the pandemic. But he made swift changes in his short tenure. To reduce risk taking, Mr. Horta-Osório said, the bank would close most of its prime brokerage businesses, which involve lending to big trading firms like Archegos. Credit Suisse also lost a big source of revenue as the market for special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, cooled.

By July, Credit Suisse had announced its third consecutive quarterly loss. Mr. Gottstein was replaced by Mr. Körner, a veteran of the rival Swiss bank UBS.

Mr. Körner and the chairman, Axel Lehmann, who replaced Mr. Horta-Osório, are expected to unveil a new restructuring plan on Oct. 27 in an effort to convince investors of the bank’s long-term viability and profitability. The stock of Credit Suisse has dipped so much in the past year that its market value — which stood around $12 billion — is comparable to that of a regional U.S. bank, smaller than Fifth Third or Citizens Financial Group.

appeared on Reddit.

Mr. Macleod said he had decided that Credit Suisse was in bad shape after looking at what he deemed the best measure of a bank’s value — the price of its stock relative to its “book value,” or assets minus liabilities. Most Wall Street analysts factor in a broader set of measures.

But “bearing in mind that most followers on Twitter and Reddit are not financial professionals,” he said, “it would have been a wake-up call for them.”

The timing puzzled the bank’s analysts, major investors and risk managers. Credit Suisse had longstanding problems, but no sudden crisis or looming bankruptcy.

Some investors said the Sept. 30 memo sent by Mr. Körner, the bank’s chief executive, reassuring staff that Credit Suisse stood on a “strong capital base and liquidity position” despite recent market gyrations had the opposite effect on stock watchers.

Credit Suisse took the matter seriously. Over the weekend of Oct. 1, bank executives called clients to reassure them that the bank had more than the amount of capital required by regulators. The bigger worry was that talk of a liquidity crisis would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, prompting lenders to pull credit lines and depositors to pull cash, which could drain money from the bank quickly — an extreme and even unlikely scenario given the bank’s strong financial position.

“Banks rely on sentiment,” Mr. Scholtz, the Morningstar analyst, said. “If all depositors want their money back tomorrow, the money isn’t there. It’s the reality of banking. These things can snowball.”

What had snowballed was the volume of trading in Credit Suisse’s stock by small investors, which had roughly doubled from Friday to Monday, according to a gauge of retail activity from Nasdaq Data Link.

Amateur traders who gather on social media can’t trade sophisticated products like credit-default swaps — products that protect against companies’ reneging on their debts. But their speculation drove the price of these swaps past levels reached during the 2008 financial crisis.

Some asset managers said they had discussed the fate of the bank at internal meetings after the meme stock mania that was unleashed in early October. While they saw no immediate risk to Credit Suisse’s solvency, some decided to cut trading with the bank anyway until risks subsided.

In another private message on Twitter, Mr. Lewis declined to speak further about why he had predicted that Credit Suisse would collapse.

“The math and evidence is fairly obvious at this point,” he wrote. “If you disagree, the burden is really on you to support that position.”

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Swiss National Bank monitoring Credit Suisse situation – Maechler

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ZURICH, Oct 5 (Reuters) – The Swiss National Bank (SNB) is following the situation at Credit Suisse (CSGN.S) closely, SNB Governing Board member Andrea Maechler told Reuters on Wednesday.

Switzerland’s second-biggest bank saw its shares slide by as much as 11.5% and its bonds hit record lows on Monday, before clawing back some of the losses, amid concerns about its ability to restructure its business without asking investors for more money. read more

“We are monitoring the situation,” Maechler said on the sidelines of an event in Zurich. “They are working on a strategy due to come out at the end of October.”

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The SNB has declined to comment in the past about Credit Suisse, which has said it has a strong capital base and liquidity. It is due to announce details of a restructuring plan along with third-quarter results on Oct. 27.

In July, Credit Suisse announced its second strategy review in a year and replaced its chief executive, bringing in restructuring expert Ulrich Koerner to prune its investment banking arm and cut more than $1 billion in costs. read more

The bank is considering measures to scale back its investment bank into a “capital-light, advisory-led” business, and is evaluating strategic options for the securitised products business, Credit Suisse has said.

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Reporting by John Revill
Editing by Michael Shields and Mark Potter

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Credit Suisse aims for stronger franchise from global review

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HONG KONG, Sept 24 (Reuters) – Credit Suisse’s (CSGN.S) top two executives have told staff the bank is working to establish a stronger franchise in the longer term, according to a memo seen by Reuters on Saturday, amid uncertainty over a global review of its operations.

The memo sent by Chairman Axel Lehmann and Chief Executive Ulrich Koerner said a “heightened level of media and market speculation” regarding the review had raised questions among the bank’s staff and clients.

Reuters reported on Thursday that Credit Suisse had sounded out investors about a possible capital raising as it attempts a radical overhaul of its investment bank.

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Koerner was appointed chief executive in late July and ordered a review of the bank’s operations, the second of its type in two years.

“When we launched our strategic review, we committed to an ambitious timeline whilst also making it clear that we would carry out a rigorous and diligent evaluation of all options for Credit Suisse,” the note said.

“We want to establish a clear path for the bank that will strengthen our franchise for the long term. This process requires time and a significant effort from many parts of the organization.”

A Credit Suisse spokesperson confirmed the contents of the memo.

Various scenarios are under discussion for the investment bank, including the most drastic option of largely exiting the U.S. market, two sources said. A bank spokesman said “Credit Suisse is not exiting the U.S. market.”

The review’s findings will be published on Oct. 27 when the bank releases its third-quarter earnings, said the memo, first published by Bloomberg News earlier on Saturday.

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Reporting by Scott Murdoch; Editing by David Holmes

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Scott Murdoch

Thomson Reuters

Scott Murdoch has been a journalist for more than two decades working for Thomson Reuters and News Corp in Australia. He has specialised in financial journalism for most of his career and covers equity and debt capital markets across Asia based in Hong Kong.

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Credit Suisse expected to announce Koerner as CEO, replacing Gottstein – sources

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July 26 (Reuters) – Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN.S) is expected to announce Ulrich Koerner as its new chief executive, the latest management churn at the Swiss bank as it struggles to recover from a series of scandals, two sources familiar with the situation said on Tuesday.

Pressure had been mounting on current CEO Thomas Gottstein for months over major scandals and losses racked up during his two-year tenure that have hammered shares and angered investors. In recent months some investors had called for replacing Gottstein, but the bank resisted.

Another senior executive, Christian Meissner, head of the lender’s investment bank, is also planning to leave the group, the Financial Times reported.

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One of the sources said the bank was expected to announce the change in CEO on Wednesday along with its quarterly results.

Credit Suisse declined to comment. Meissner did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters.

When Gottstein took the helm in 2020, he promised a “clean slate” for the bank, which was recovering from an internal spying scandal that cost his predecessor Tidjane Thiam his job.

Since Thiam left in February 2020, the stock is down nearly 60% and troubles at the bank have only escalated. In 2021, the bank disclosed a $5.5 billion loss from the unraveling of U.S. investment firm Archegos and the collapse of $10 billion worth of supply chain finance funds. The events prompted management ousters, investigations, and a capital increase – followed by further losses and fresh legal cases. read more

Credit Suisse brought in Koerner in April 2021 to lead its newly separated asset management division following the collapse of the $10 billion worth of supply chain finance funds linked to insolvent financier Greensill Capital.

Koerner returned to Credit Suisse from arch-rival UBS, where he most recently served as adviser to the CEO from 2019 to 2020. He ran UBS Asset Management from 2014 to 2019. Koerner was previously a senior executive at Credit Suisse Financial Services and ran the Swiss business. read more

Koerner, who used to work for McKinsey, is considered a restructuring expert in Switzerland.

Nevertheless, the appointment would follow other major European banks where diversity at the top has been lacking. The 25 biggest banks by assets have seen 22 changes in chief executive and chair over the past two years according to a Reuters review of senior industry roles. Twenty-one of those 22 jobs went to men. read more

This spring, Credit Suisse’s chairman Axel Lehmann reiterated his support for Gottstein after Artisan Partners, the bank’s ninth-largest shareholder, had publicly called for Gottstein to be replaced. read more

“I fully back him because he is good,” Lehmann said in a CNBC interview at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. He dismissed as “rumors and speculations” talk that Gottstein could be on his way out.

The WSJ earlier reported that Gottstein may soon be replaced, days after Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung reported the bank is considering further cost cuts. read more

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Reporting by Oliver Hirt in Zurich, Shivam Patel in Bengaluru and Elisa Martinuzzi in London; Additional writing by Megan Davies; Editing by Devika Syamnath and Richard Pullin

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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How Roman Abramovich Used Shell Companies and Wall Street Ties to Invest in the U.S.

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In July 2012, a shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands wired $20 million to an investment vehicle in the Cayman Islands that was controlled by a large American hedge fund firm.

The wire transfer was the culmination of months of work by a small army of handlers and enablers in the United States, Europe and the Caribbean. It was a stealth operation intended, at least in part, to mask the source of the funds: Roman Abramovich.

For two decades, the Russian oligarch has relied on this circuitous investment strategy — deploying a string of shell companies, routing money through a small Austrian bank and tapping the connections of leading Wall Street firms — to quietly place billions of dollars with prominent U.S. hedge funds and private equity firms, according to people with knowledge of the transactions.

The key was that every lawyer, corporate director, hedge fund manager and investment adviser involved in the process could honestly say he or she wasn’t working directly for Mr. Abramovich. In some cases, participants weren’t even aware of whose money they were helping to manage.

asked Congress for more resources as it helps to oversee the Biden administration’s sanctions program along with a new Justice Department kleptocracy task force. And on Capitol Hill, lawmakers are pushing a bill, known as the Enablers Act, that would require investment advisers to identify and more carefully vet their customers.

Mr. Abramovich has an estimated fortune of $13 billion, derived in large part from his well-timed purchase of an oil company owned by the Russian government that he sold back to the state at a massive profit. This month, European and Canadian authorities imposed sanctions on him and froze his assets, which include the famed Chelsea Football Club in London. The United States has not placed sanctions on him.

a pair of luxury residences near Aspen, Colo. But he also invested large sums of money with financial institutions. His ties to Mr. Putin and the source of his wealth have long made him a controversial figure.

Many of Mr. Abramovich’s U.S. investments were facilitated by a small firm, Concord Management, which is led by Michael Matlin, according to people with knowledge of the transactions who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Mr. Matlin declined to comment beyond issuing a statement that described Concord as “a consulting firm that provides independent third-party research, due diligence and monitoring of investments.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Abramovich didn’t respond to emails and text messages requesting comment.

Concord, founded in 1999, didn’t directly manage any of Mr. Abramovich’s money. It acted more like an investment adviser and due diligence firm, making recommendations to the directors of shell companies in Caribbean tax havens about potential investments in marquee American investment firms, according to people briefed on the matter.

Paycheck Protection Program loan worth $265,000 during the pandemic. (Concord repaid the loan, a spokesman said.)

Concord’s secrecy made some on Wall Street wary.

In 2015 and 2016, investigators at State Street, a financial services firm, filed “suspicious activity reports” alerting the U.S. government to transactions that Concord arranged involving some of Mr. Abramovich’s Caribbean shell companies, BuzzFeed News reported. State Street declined to comment.

American financial institutions are required to file such reports to help the U.S. government combat money laundering and other financial crimes, though the reports are not themselves evidence of any wrongdoing having been committed.

But for the most part, American financiers had no inkling about — or interest in discovering — the source of the money that Concord was directing. As long as routine background checks didn’t turn up red flags, it was fine.

Paulson & Company, the hedge fund run by John Paulson, received investments from a company that Concord represented, according to a person with knowledge of the investment. Mr. Paulson said in an email that he had “no knowledge” of Concord’s investors.

Concord also steered tens of millions of dollars from two shell companies to Highland Capital, a Texas hedge fund. Highland hired a unit of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, to ensure that the companies were legitimate and that the investments complied with anti-money-laundering rules, according to federal court records in an unrelated bankruptcy case.

“corporate governance services” to investment managers.

For $15,000 a year, plus other fees, HighWater would provide an employee to sit on the board of the financial vehicle that the fund manager was expected to launch to accept the wealthy family’s money, according to emails between the fund manager and a HighWater executive reviewed by The New York Times.

The fund manager also brought on Boris Onefater, who ran a small U.S. consulting firm, Constellation, as another board member. Mr. Onefater said in an interview that he couldn’t remember whose money the Cayman vehicle was managing. “You’re asking for ancient history,” he said. “I don’t recall Mr. Abramovich’s name coming up.”

The fund manager hired Mourant, an offshore law firm, to get the paperwork for the Cayman vehicle in order. The managing partner of Mourant did not respond to requests for comment.

He also hired GlobeOp Financial Services, which provides administration services to hedge funds, to ensure that the Cayman entity was complying with anti-money-laundering laws and wasn’t doing business with anyone who had been placed under U.S. government sanctions, according to a copy of the contract.

“We abide by all laws in all jurisdictions in which we do business,” said Emma Lowrey, a spokeswoman for SS&C Technologies, a financial technology company based in Windsor, Conn., that now owns GlobeOp.

John Lewis, a HighWater executive, said in an email to The Times that his firm received four referrals from Concord from 2011 to 2014 and hadn’t dealt with the firm since then.

“We were aware of no links to Russian money or Roman Abramovich,” Mr. Lewis said. He added that GlobeOp “did not identify anything unusual, high risk, or that there were any politically exposed persons with respect to any investors.”

The Cayman fund opened for business in July 2012 when $20 million arrived by wire transfer. The expectation was that tens of millions more would follow, although additional funds never showed up. The Cayman fund was run as an independent entity, using the same investment strategy — buying and selling exchange-traded funds — employed by the fund manager’s main U.S. hedge fund.

The $20 million was wired from an entity called Caythorpe Holdings, which was registered in the British Virgin Islands.

Documents accompanying the wire transfer showed that the money originated with Kathrein Privatbank in Vienna. It arrived in Grand Cayman after passing through another Austrian bank, Raiffeisen, and then JPMorgan. (JPMorgan was serving as a correspondent bank, essentially acting as an intermediary for banks with smaller international networks.)

A spokesman for Kathrein declined to comment. A spokeswoman for JPMorgan declined to comment. Representatives for Raiffeisen did not respond to requests for comment.

The fund manager noticed that some of the documentation was signed by a lawyer named Natalia Bychenkova. The Russian-sounding name led him to conclude that he was probably managing money for a Russian oligarch. But the fund manager wasn’t bothered, since GlobeOp had verified that Caythorpe was compliant with know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering rules and laws.

He didn’t know who controlled Caythorpe, and he didn’t ask.

In early 2014, after Russia invaded the Ukrainian region of Crimea, markets tanked. The fund manager made a bearish bet on the direction of the stock market, and his fund got crushed when stocks rallied.

The next year, Caythorpe withdrew its money from the Cayman fund. Caythorpe was liquidated in 2017.

The fund manager said he didn’t realize until this month that he had been investing money for Mr. Abramovich.

Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research. Maureen Farrell contributed reporting.

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Russians have up to $213 billion stashed offshore in Swiss banks, article with image

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Russian rouble banknotes are seen in this illustration picture taken in Moscow, September 30, 2014. REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev/File Photo

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ZURICH, March 17 (Reuters) – Switzerland’s secretive banks hold up to $213 billion of Russian wealth, the country’s financial industry association estimates, as sanctions on Russia give a rare glimpse inside Swiss vaults.

The Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) estimated that the banks hold between 150 billion and 200 billion Swiss francs ($213 billion) of Russian client money in offshore accounts.

This indicates that the extent of wealthy Russians’ business with banks in Switzerland, the world’s biggest centre for offshore wealth, is far more extensive than the on-balance sheet exposures several of its financial firms have begun to detail.

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The SBA’s revelation is rare for Switzerland, which has stone-walled many previous transparency requests, and comes as it took the unusual step of applying European Union sanctions to Russian cash following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine last month.

There is growing Swiss public debate about its role, with Mattea Meyer, co-president of the Social Democrats, calling for Switzerland to clamp down on any cash belonging to Russians close to President Vladimir Putin and his government.

“Part belongs to oligarchs loyal to the Kremlin. The money and their activity … helps finance the war,” she said, adding that Switzerland “must do everything possible to turn off the money taps”.

The SBA estimate, which dwarfs initial indications of the credit exposure to Russia, makes clear the scale of the task of imposing sanctions, such as by freezing the cash.

The Swiss economy ministry said that it had no meaningful estimates on frozen Russian assets as it tallies reports from banks facing a growing Swiss sanctions list. read more

Despite its Russian tally estimate, the SBA stressed that this was small compared to overall assets held in Switzerland, which has been regarded by generations of wealthy individuals from around the world as a safe haven for their money.

“The share of assets held for Russian clients likely accounts for a share in the low single-digit percentage range of the total cross-border assets deposited with Swiss banks,” it said in an emailed statement to Reuters on Wednesday, referring to money held for clients residing abroad.

RUSSIAN RISK

As Western governments unleash a growing list of sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion, banks are seeing their business with Russian clients scrutinized far beyond the loans they have granted or business done out of Russian subsidiaries that could lead to balance sheet losses.

Analysts have said direct Swiss bank exposures to Russian clients look manageable, based on what has been made public.

Switzerland’s two biggest banks last week detailed “limited” exposures to Russia, with the largest UBS saying a $634 million direct exposure had been cut since year-end. read more

Credit Suisse (CSGN.S) Chief Executive Thomas Gottstein on Tuesday said some 4% of the assets Switzerland’s second-biggest bank manages for wealthy clients belong to Russians, amounting to tens of billions of dollars. read more

That is far greater than the 848 million Swiss franc net credit exposure in Credit Suisse’s annual report. read more

While the bank has not provided an updated tally, it managed 827 billion francs in its wealth management businesses at end-2021, so 4% would amount to some 33 billion Swiss francs in assets associated with Russian customers.

UBS (UBSG.S) and Switzerland’s third-largest listed lender, Julius Baer (BAER.S), have declined to detail assets they hold for Russian customers, but UBS CEO Ralph Hamers indicated sanctions were keeping the country’s biggest bank busy.

“New lists come out every night,” he said, adding that UBS was looking to shield not only against current compliance but also against the risk of future penalties.

($1 = 0.9395 Swiss francs)

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Reporting by Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi and Oliver Hirt; Additional reporting by Michael Shields; Editing by John O’Donnell and Alexander Smith

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Hurt by Losses, Credit Suisse Faces Reckoning Under New Chairman

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But risk problems lingered under the surface: The departure of longtime bankers during his tenure had cost Credit Suisse valuable institutional knowledge, and the bank had built an increased zeal for working with up-and-comers, like Luckin Coffee and Greensill.

In finance, risk management — the ability to take into account a sometimes-volatile mix of bank positions, market activities, assets and liabilities, and reputational and technological concerns to foresee potential losses — is a crucial skill.

But the bank’s approach has been extremely technical, said Arturo Bris, a professor of finance at the IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland. An overreliance on calculation can be a problem if those in charge aren’t taking a holistic view.

“Most of these failures have much more to do with human mistakes,” he said. “I don’t think they’re good risk managers.”

Consider the Archegos collapse: The prime brokerage head of risk who oversaw Credit Suisse’s dealings with Archegos had once handled the bank’s sales relationship with the firm. Above him was a chief risk officer whose background was in finance and compliance — not risk.

Credit Suisse has held more than a half-dozen executives responsible for its recent stumbles. The last day for Brian Chin, the chief executive of the investment bank, was Friday. Lara Warner, the chief risk and compliance officer, already departed. And then there was the departure of Mr. Gottschling, the board’s risk committee leader, who did not seek re-election at the annual meeting.

Now Mr. Horta-Osório will have to figure out whether Credit Suisse can steady its investment bank with personnel changes, or if a more serious makeover is in order.

If he chooses to make big changes, he may have to move swiftly.

“Shareholders and employees cannot wait for months for a new strategy,” said Manuel Ammann, a professor at the Swiss Institute for Banking and Finance at the University of St. Gallen. “They need to deliver fast.”

Anupreeta Das contributed reporting.

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Credit Suisse reports a loss as regulators open an investigation.

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Credit Suisse said on Thursday that it suffered a loss in the first quarter stemming from loans it made to the collapsed investment fund Archegos Capital Management, a debacle that has prompted Switzerland’s financial regulator to investigate whether the bank was doing a poor job monitoring the riskiness of its investments.

The loss of 252 million Swiss francs, about $275 million, from January through March came after a loss of 4.4 billion francs from Archegos that wiped out a big increase in revenue. Credit Suisse also said on Thursday that it had sold bonds to investors to raise $2 billion to shore up its capital.

The bank expects additional losses from Archegos of about $655 million as it finishes winding down its exposure to the firm, Thomas Gottstein, the chief executive of Credit Suisse, said during a conference call with reporters Thursday.

The bank, based in Zurich, has suffered a series of calamities this year that have severely damaged its reputation and finances. Swiss regulators are also investigating a spying scandal and Credit Suisse’s sale of $10 billion in funds packaged by Greensill Capital. The funds were based on financing provided to companies, many of which had low credit ratings or were not rated at all. Greensill collapsed in March, and its ties to former Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain have caused a political scandal.

Finma, said it would “investigate in particular possible shortcomings in risk management” at Credit Suisse. Finma also said it would “continue to exchange information with the competent authorities in the U.K. and the U.S.A.”

The Wall Street Journal that Credit Suisse’s exposure to Archegos had reached more than $20 billion before the fund collapsed in late March. Mr. Gottstein conceded that Credit Suisse was one of the banks most exposed to Archegos.

The quarterly loss, which Mr. Gottstein described as “unacceptable,” compared with a profit of 1.3 billion francs in the first quarter of 2020.

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Archegos Left a Sparse Paper Trail for a $10 Billion Firm

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Lawyers and securities experts said a multibillion-dollar family office like Archegos could avoid making 13F disclosures, but it would require threading a needle: The firm could have managed money for only Mr. Hwang and his spouse — not other family members, fund employees or his charity, which operated on the same floor of a Midtown Manhattan office building. The firm could also have been able to skip filing a 13F if it sold off enough stocks to fall below the $100 million threshold before the end of each quarter. It also could have requested confidential treatment from the S.E.C. to keep such disclosures private, lawyers and experts said.

Archegos was set up to make filings to the S.E.C. — it had its own Central Index Key number — but a search for documents returns no results.

The S.E.C. has opened an informal inquiry into Archegos and the spillover effects of its collapse, which caused billions of dollars in losses at banks around the globe. Regulators have declined to comment on the investigation.

Senator Sherrod Brown, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, sent letters to the half-dozen banks that did business with Archegos — including Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — seeking information about their dealings with Mr. Hwang’s firm. That includes information about any transactions that “would be subject to regulatory reporting with the S.E.C.”

The rules for 13F filings apply to “registered investment advisers and exempt reporting advisers that manage accounts on behalf of others, including advisers to separately managed accounts, private funds, mutual funds, and pension plans.” They must file if they have “discretion” over $100 million or more in securities at the end of a quarter.

Nicolas Morgan, a former S.E.C. lawyer, said a family office could get around the stock reporting requirement in only rare circumstances. It “would be outside the norm” to not file a 13F, said Mr. Morgan, a partner in the white-collar defense practice at Paul Hastings.

After the failure of Archegos, Americans for Financial Reform, an advocacy group, sent a letter to the S.E.C. calling for a review of 13F filings and whether gaps in the disclosure process created the registration exemption for family offices, which control roughly $6 trillion in assets, according to Campden Wealth, which provides research and networking opportunities to wealthy families.

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Jamie Dimon Sees a Boom Coming

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The annual letter to shareholders by JPMorgan Chase’s chief Jamie Dimon was just published. The widely read letter is not just an overview of the bank’s business but also covers Mr. Dimon’s thoughts on everything from leadership lessons to public policy prescriptions.

“The U.S. economy will likely boom.” A combination of excess savings, deficit spending, a potential infrastructure bill, vaccinations and “euphoria around the end of the pandemic,” Mr. Dimon wrote, may create a boom that “could easily run into 2023.” That could justify high equity valuations, but not the price of U.S. debt, given the “huge supply” soon to hit the market. There is a chance that a rise in inflation would be “more than temporary,” he wrote, forcing the Fed to raise interest rates aggressively. “Rapidly raising rates to offset an overheating economy is a typical cause of a recession,” he wrote, but he hopes for “the Goldilocks scenario” of fast growth, gently increasing inflation and a measured rise in interest rates.

“Banks are playing an increasingly smaller role in the financial system.” Mr. Dimon cited competition from an already large shadow banking system and fintech companies, as well as “Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and now Walmart.” He argued those nonbank competitors should be more strictly regulated; their growth has “partially been made possible” by avoiding banking rules, he wrote. And when it comes to tougher regulation of big banks, he wrote, “the cost to the economy of having fail-safe banks may not be worth it.”

“China’s leaders believe that America is in decline.” While the U.S. has faced tough times before, today “the Chinese see an America that is losing ground in technology, infrastructure and education — a nation torn and crippled by politics, as well as racial and income inequality — and a country unable to coordinate government policies (fiscal, monetary, industrial, regulatory) in any coherent way to accomplish national goals,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, recently, there is a lot of truth to this.”

a leveraged buyout offer from the private equity firm CVC Capital, sending its shares to a four-year high. Toshiba has had a series of scandals, and faces pressure from activist investors.

raising the corporate rate to help pay for President Biden’s infrastructure plans — though he didn’t mention the White House’s proposed rate, 28 percent. Other corporate chiefs are privately criticizing the potential tax rise.

The company behind the Johnson & Johnson vaccine mix-up has a history of errors. Emergent BioSolutions, which the U.S. relied on to produce doses by J.&J. and AstraZeneca, had a made manufacturing errors before. Experts worry this may leave some Americans more wary of getting vaccinated, even as Mr. Biden has moved up the eligibility deadline for U.S. inoculations.

An electric aircraft maker sues a rival for intellectual property theft. Wisk, which is backed by Boeing and the Google founder Larry Page, said that former employees downloaded confidential information before joining Archer, a competitor. Archer, which is going public by merging with a SPAC run by Moelis & Company and which counts United Airlines as an investor, denied wrongdoing and said it was cooperating with a government investigation.

A blistering start for venture capital in 2021. Start-ups set a fund-raising quarterly record in the first three months of the year, raising more than $62 billion, according to the MoneyTree report from PwC and CB Insights. That’s more than twice the total a year earlier and represents nearly half of what start-ups raised in all of 2020.

Voting in the union election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., ended on March 29, and counting began the next day, but the outcome is still unknown. What’s going on? It’s less about the number of ballots than how they’re counted.

The stakes are high, for both Amazon and the labor movement. Progressive leaders like Bernie Sanders have argued a victory for the union, the first at an Amazon facility in the U.S., could inspire workers elsewhere to unionize. And Amazon is facing increased scrutiny for its market power and labor practices.

a painstaking process:

— Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the I.M.F., on how the uneven rollout of vaccines poses a threat to the global economic recovery.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Credit Suisse emerged battered by high-risk bets and promised to do better. A series of recent scandals suggests it hasn’t, The Times’s Jack Ewing writes.

A recap of the Swiss bank’s troubles over the past year or so:

30-day comment period on to-be-drafted regulations that would make it harder to obscure who controls a company. Among the details to be worked out are what entities should report and when; how to collect, protect and update information for a database; and the criteria for sharing with law enforcement.

“We could not be more excited,” Kenneth Blanco, the director of the Treasury’s Financial Criminal Enforcement Network (FinCEN), told bankers recently. The U.S. has been under pressure to address its vulnerability to money laundering and financial crimes:

New rules could make forming small businesses, special purpose vehicles and other closely held entities “significantly” more burdensome, said Steve Ganis of Mintz, an expert in anti-money laundering regulation. “FinCEN’s new regime will make things much more complicated for start-ups, where control and ownership are highly fluid,” he said. Public companies and many larger businesses would be exempt because they already face stricter scrutiny.

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