Meltdown |
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20 February 2026 - Erlenbach
Credit Suisse's was the first big financial collapse that happened in Switzerland after I moved here. Although based it Zürich, it was quite international by then. Duncan Mavin's Meltdown tells this tale and some of the history of the firm that preceded it. We get the story of the founder, Alfred Escher, and his creation of a bank to finance the building of Swiss railroads in the 19th century. Escher, sadly, comes to a scandelous end as to many of the Credit Suisse characters in Mavin's book. I wonder how much this really has to do with Credit Suisse having had a particularly corruptable culture (as Mavin asserts), or if it has more to do with Mavin's experience as a financial journalist leads him to look for scandels. And looking through the book's citation one realizes that they're nearly all from English language sources despite the bank being based in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Scandals do make great stories though, and Credit Suisse's end was ignomenious enough for an journalist to salivate over. If Mavin had just wrote about this final death blow, then that would have been one thing, but chapter after chapter of the book is just about one scandal after another without giving a broader picture of the bank's development. This left me somewhat disappointed, although it's not too unusual for the genre. I did enjoy some of the bits where Zürich's local color shone through though.
