LEADING FINANCIAL BRANDS are hard to kill. And that’s one of the few good bits of news that UBS has received over the past two years.
In that time, the reputation of the three letters that for decades have stood as the safe, secure and profitable symbol of Swiss banking has been assailed from all sides. UBS has lost not only its hard-won reputation: it has also lost a chairman and a chief executive, a handful of other senior executives and a number of board members; binned a large part of an investment banking franchise; written off $49 billion of book value, and counting; sent packing $60 billion of poisoned assets to a petrified Swiss government; and waved goodbye to more than $50 billion of assets under management in its key wealth management franchise, with the prospect of an awful lot more to follow....
