It is nearly six years since Lehman Brothers collapsed and financial markets teetered on the edge of calamity. As stability returned, all my sources in the banking world said that increasing regulation would be the new rule of the game. And this has proved to be the case.
Very few predicted however that fortunes would be made as central banks flooded economies with absurd amounts of cheap money for far too long. It does seem to me that we must be nearer the beginning of the end than the end of the beginning for this particular cycle.
But is it the end of the road for two bank chief executives who emerged from the crisis relatively unscathed? For a while now, wise sources have been questioning how much longer Brady Dougan and Anshu Jain can continue to pilot their respective European institutions. In mid-May, Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to an “extensive and wide-ranging conspiracy” to help US clients evade taxes. The bank agreed to pay about $2.6 billion in fines and became the first large global bank in decades to admit to criminal charges.
These fines dwarf the amount that UBS paid ($780 million) in 2009 for helping US citizens evade taxes.