How would a bank run play out in the details? Say like with Northern Rock? I am assuming they shut off any kind of electronic banking then, limited the amounts you could withdraw and so on? Are those moves legal? Or are they simply illegal and if they go under you could only sue them for peanuts anyways?

I would like to transfer my money from UBS to Swiss post. I went to Swiss post website to open an account but I found it very confusing. The amont of choices and all the yellowness was doing my head in. Is there any branch of Swiss post I could go to that looks more like a bank rather than talking to postal lady behind a counter?

I want to have an account that has online banking and maybe where I can put half my money in savings account so the interest rate is slightly higher. What account from Swiss post applies to me? Their "online set", "private set" is confusing me.

Does anyone know the maximum amount I can transfer from UBS via e-banking in one go?

Everyone keeps saying that if UBS goes down then Swiss economy will tank and the money we have won't be worth much irrespective of who we bank with. Well that is all clear and fine but isn't it better to have almost worthless money than no money at all?

The Swiss economy would be badly affected given the big contribution that the financial services sector makes to Swiss GDP. So the franc would be weakened on the foreign exchange markets, this would lead to higher inflation because the cost of imports would go up and the cost of borrowing would go up (which would be passed on to the consumer) so the franc in your pocket would buy less. Furthermore, unemployment would go up and falling financial services revenues would have a big impact on the State's tax revenues (it already has) with all that entails. To say the franc wouldn't be "worth much" is an exaggeration but moving to another bank won't immune you from the fall out. I for one don't think it'll come to that. Even if it did, I think a buy-out would be much more likely. And look at WaMu - bank customers are unaffected - JPM bought the assets and left the debt in the company. So depositors were safe. It's the shareholders and bondholders who have been wiped out.

Yes they have made it very confusing.
I assume you want to leave UBS because of the 30K limit so you need the Plus set that is aimed at people with over 25,000 CHF in the account. If you don't have that much then the online set.
You fill in the application form on the web site & after a few days you get a form to take to a Post office & you are set. Then you transfer money to your new account. When the your Post office online banking is activated you can during an online session open a deposit (edeposito) account & transfer money into it.

Marton

Talking about stupid I hope that with the bail out package the US scrap all these useless & costly governance schemes like SOX & Basel 1 to n. For example, WaMu, AIG & Bear Stearns were SOX compliant (maybe somebody should audit the auditors) - instead of governance schemes they should simply make bad judgement illegal

Marton

Thanks Marton. Yes I have over 25k so plus set it will be. Thanks for the confirmation.

Interesting point. I think we're going to hear a lot about bad governance and increased regulation as the blame game plays out.

To be fair, SOX is designed to protect against fraud and accounting errors à la Enron by tightening up on disclosure standards. But fraud and accounting errors aren’t at the heart of the credit crunch and the collapse of Northern rock, Lehman, Merrill, AIG etc. As you point out, incompetence and bad judgement on an epic scale certainly, but that's not what SOX was designed to prevent. I make one qualification to that statement - some banks like Citigroup and Merrill had put significant sub prime exposure off balance sheet which subsequently they had to, or chose to, bring back onto their books when the *hit hit the fan, thereby increasing their write downs. Though they didn’t break accounting rules,those exposures should never have been off balance sheet in the first place and I’m sure when the dust settles something will done about that.
Same with Basle II. The increased capital requirements will no doubt result in deeper capital cushions but Basle II doesn’t save you when assets crater overnight, liquidity dries up and you can’t finance your operations. It forces you to recapitalise to make good the holes in your balance sheet after big writedowns but that’s bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

What failed was effective management and supervision at the people level. People, not regulations, are at the heart of the credit crisis. Why didn’t the Boards and regulators challenge the CEOs about the way the business was being run - that they were leveraging up their balance sheets to make huge, concentrated proprietary bets. It’s obvious with hindsight that Northern Rock’s funding model was flawed - financing long term assets with short term liabilities. Who was ringing the alarm bells and challenging the CEO? I read an article recently which suggested that it should have been obvious to the Management, Senior Risk Managers, Board and external Regulators of AIG that providing CDS insurance isn’t a simple actuarial process like fire and life insurance. Saving a meteor strike, systemic risk doesn’t happen in the life insurance and fire insurance business. Just because you die it doesn’t increase the risk that I will die. Insurance companies get that. The article questioned whether AIG management understood that a major slump in the US housing market very definitely introduced a systemic risk of multiple defaults which in turn made life difficult for those who guaranteed those loans, especially when the knock on was a freezing up of credit markets so the banks can’t borrow risk defaulting themselves. All of these might have seemed like extreme events - like a meteor strike - but the job of the risk manager is to stress test for these events and determine if the bank could cope with the fallout. If not Management should listen up and put the brakes on. They have the technology and the models afterall.

What is more surprising is that with all the access to information that regulators like the Bank of England, The Fed, the FSA and the SEC have, no-one spoke out about the risks building up until the bubble burst. It’s not as if the risks were hidden. They were there if you opened your eyes. The world changed after Barings collapsed and modern IT platforms brought in since then allow you to drill down into the business in mind numbing, real-time detail. So for me, like you, I blame Senior Management of the banks, their Heads of Risk Management and the Boards and Regualtors who are supposed to police them. Increased regulation of banks is inevitable. The Politicians will see to that and for the investment banks it’s overdue. But the epicentre of the credit crisis is the country whose banks are the most heavily regulated in the word. It didn’t stop the crisis. You can regulate a bank to a standstill if you want but human failures like arrogance, greed, incompetence, negliegence, not asking the right questions, or not understanding the risks of the business you’re doing... these are the key problems and the best computer models in the world are no substitute. You can’t regulate or model-in competence and good judgement. And you can't outsource it to credit agencies either.

Goldman, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, the big Japanese Banks - all these avoided the worst of the sub prime fall out. That wasn’t because they were more regulated than their more unfortunate peers or because they had better models. The decisions their management took kept them out of harm's way by not jumping on the bandwagon of the cheap credit fuelled, easy money. So it can be done.

But how do I go about buying them?


In the UK, it's easy to get into bonds. Just buy an NS&I product which are govt. bonds packaged for the public.

How do I go about purchasing Swiss govt bonds?


(Then there's the problem that Nev has pointed out, if UBS or CS get into trouble then the entire Swiss currency is toast anyway.

However, I'd rather have my CHF cash in Bonds than with either UBS or CS.)

Got into gold back when it was around $750 just a few short weeks ago - not as much as I'd have liked though before it rocketed up.

Completely agree with what you wrote. I also agree that the knee jerk reaction will be more regulation.
But as you also write I don't know how you can effectively regulate to avoid arrogance, greed & to compel people to drill down into activities to understand what is actually happening or could happen.

Marton

It looks as if Bradford & Bingley is the next to go

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/f...ownership.html

Rod

This reminds me of the end of the dotcom boom. There was a website the chronicled the failures of startups called F**KEDCOMPANY.COM. It was a parody of a magazine called Fast Company. It may be an appropriate to revive the concept with F*KEDBANKS.COM and F*KEDCOUNTRIES.COM.

I can build the site, if anyone wants to write in it.

Talking about regulation; I missed this little gem yesterday

"The Securities and Exchange Commission said Friday it was ending a program of voluntary oversight for Wall Street investment banks that its chairman said clearly has not worked.

SEC Chairman Christopher Cox announced the agency's decision to end the program under which SEC examiners inspected the five biggest Wall Street banks: Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), Lehman Brothers (LEH, Fortune 500), Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) and Bear Stearns Cos.

Cox said in a statement. The program "was fundamentally flawed ......."

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Anyway glad that Mr Cox noticed oversight for Wall Street investment banks did not work; suppose he could not do much else when all involved either went bust or were sold at knock down prices or simply stopped being investment banks.

Marton

Yep. You can't rely on self interested parties to regulate themselves. And with the major players in Wall Street now banks or owned by banks, the job of supervising them will pass to the Fed. The SEC is becoming sidelined. This raises the question of whether the Fed has the right people and enough of them, to supervise the new businesses under it's umbrella. The answer is a no. It's costing a fortune on both sides of the Atlantic to dig us out of this mess. Let's hope they spend some of that dosh on paying up to hire people who understand the complex businesses these financial institutions are engaged in, to spot what is wrong and with the balls to do something about it. Rule number one of risk management....you can't manage risk if you don't understand what or where it is!

True but general management, compliance management, Internal audit & risk management do have a defined role to play.
I never understood how regulators have a clear role to play what with the layers of management, financial auditors & governance auditors all in the same play area.

Marton

Is this going to be black Monday 2008 I wonder...Franc is gaining as we speak against many currencies. (For quick access, see chart of 13 majors at:
http://www.wechselstube.com/index.php?id=215). Dollar is still holding up but how much of that is artificial, in other words propped up by central banks without us knowing?

Update
Fortis has slid further towards the drain, despite a major rescue operation by no less than three countries (Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg). I sincerely hope UBS is in better shape, and is not next. Fortis according to Bloomberg has a ratio slightly above 7 and exposure to about 40 billion of unsure assets.
How can you have that much exposure and only write off 2.5% of it? It seems to me they are marketing to myth as they say

Good article on Minyanville.com (as usual). First an intro, but check out page 2 on spread rates climbing like crazy: http://www.minyanville.com/articles/.../index/a/19226

Damage was caused not because of missing expertise. The root is the asymmetric risk/reward situation, i.e. "heads I win, tails you loose". The highly paid executives suffered no risk penalty. They pocketed the bonuses; were not liable for the losses.

Bank executives should be made personally liable like US doctors. The Bankers could take liability insurance. The premiums would reflect their past fiasco and present exposure.

Nice thought but not practical. A single Soc Gen trader lost $7bn. Make him personally liable? Good luck in recovering your money or finding an insurance company who would insure him. Better still short any insurance company who supplies this insurance.

Oh and another thing. When I hear that the taxpayer doesn't benefit on the upside it makes me laugh. During the boom years financial services companies, their employees and all the hangers on pay big taxes on those big profits which finds it's way into the state coffers for expenditure in the public sector . When that ends it creates a big tax shortfall which has to be made up somewhere as the Swiss government and Canton Zurich is waking up to. This is not the one way street it has been presented by politicians.

You're right however what that would do is remove some of the incentive to enter such reckless trades in the first place.

That and "let's wipe the poor homeowners' debt slate clean". Why should I sponsor them for choosing a lifestyle beyond their financial capabilities?

more crazy market days.... ubs closing at 18.15, hypo down more than 70 percent, commerzbank -20pc, bradford and bingley....

just incredible how the cards are falling.... yes shorrick you were right... but is there a lot more to come?

several bank stocks are trading at 200+ volatility. never saw those vols before.

Whats next?