Meltdown
Greed, Scandal, and the Collapse of Credit Suisse
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- 13٫99 US$
وصف الناشر
The incredible story of a once-venerable Swiss bank that produced a litany of financial scandals and whose collapse reveals the amorality at the heart of the global banking system.
Credit Suisse was a 166-year-old bastion of global banking. But a veneer of high-class service disguised a darker, much dirtier reality. From its sterile Zurich headquarters, Credit Suisse banked dictators and drug dealers, hid stolen Nazi gold, and helped corrupt bankers fleece the firm's own clients of billions of dollars. Its top executives oversaw a global operation that laundered money for autocrats; they hired spies to track one another through the cobbled streets of the Swiss financial capital; and they helped clients hide their money from the world’s tax authorities. This is the story of a tawdry total meltdown of one of the biggest, most influential, and most scandal-ridden banks on the planet.
Duncan Mavin is uniquely sourced to tell the story of Credit Suisse’s scandal-ridden demise, with dozens of inside-the-room contacts that spill exclusive details about the bank onto these pages. The bank’s collapse, in March of last year, was the biggest shock to the financial system since the Financial Crisis of 2008, and sparked a media frenzy. But only Duncan has had access to key sources within the bank’s executive suite—including former CEOs—and the inner circle that brings this critical, rollicking story to life.
Meltdown will appeal to the global audience of readers fascinated by the corruption that permeates international finance and who wish to understand the role of money and those who shuffle it around the world in manipulating the world order in their own interests. It is an international tale that takes us from Mozambique to Australia, from Hong Kong to New York, and inside the hushed, marble corridors of Zurich’s banking elite.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Money doesn't get any dirtier or dumber than in this mordant history of Credit Suisse. Bloomberg News journalist Mavin (Pyramid of Lies) recaps a litany of scandals at the giant Swiss bank, stretching back to WWII, when the bank helped Nazi Germany turn looted art and gold into international bank deposits. Subsequent misdeeds included covert banking on behalf of rogue states like Libya and Iran, enabling wealthy American clients to evade taxes, selling "crap" mortgage-backed securities that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis, and tailing and spying on its own discontented executive. But Credit Suisse's 2023 collapse, Mavin contends, was due less to scandal than stupid investments—like into the shady asset management firm Archegos Capital, whose failure cost the bank $5.5 billion. Mavin paints the Credit Suisse culture as an ungainly mix of Swiss stolidity and American-style risk-taking—inherited from its 1988 merger with investment bank First Boston—overlaid with cut-throat office politics that kept upper management in turmoil. (The bank fired its co-CEO John Mack, who ran its Manhattan office, without warning after secretly setting up a duplicate Manhattan office that he knew nothing about.) The firm thus let its bankers undertake all manner of reckless and fraudulent dealings, then dithered unimaginatively during crises, "like a runaway train without a driver." This lucid, tart, and entertaining account offers a window into the grubby chicanery and boneheaded bets that plague high finance.
