Under pressure, top Swiss bank UBS came to the rescue of its counterpart Credit Suisse on Sunday, announcing its acquisition. The acquisition is intended to appease the markets and adds to the list of mergers and acquisitions that have marked the banking sector since the great financial crisis of 2008.
• 2008: JPMorgan Chase and Bear Stearns
During the 2008 financial crisis, JPMorganChase first bought large investment bank Bear Stearns in March 2008, then Washington Mutual in September 2008. These were acquisitions made during the crisis. This strategy had allowed the institution to become the first US bank in terms of assets ahead of Bank of America and Citigroup.
• 2008: Barclays and Lehman Brothers
Driven by the collapse of its stock market and the drying up of its funding, Lehman Brothers was placed in September 2008 under the protection of US bankruptcy law (Chapter 11). The bank was dissolved entirely, with various competitors appropriating its best parts on the cheap. The British Barclays quickly recovered much of the US activities, that is to say 72 billion dollars of assets for 1.75 billion dollars – without counting the New York headquarters of the bank. For its part, the Japanese financial group Nomura has absorbed part of Lehman in Europe and Asia.
• 2009: Bank of America and Merrill Lynch
At the height of the financial turmoil, Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch for $44.4 billion. Merrill Lynch had agreed to its acquisition to avoid suffering the same fate as Lehman Brothers. This historic marriage, in January 2009, gave birth to an American financial giant, endowed at the time with more than 960,000 million dollars in deposits, ahead of JPMorganChase, which had 900,000 million.
• 2009: Caisse d’Epargne and Banque Populaire
The merger of Caisses d’Epargne and Banques Populaires, marked by many twists and turns, was launched at the same time, in the fall of 2008. It accelerated under pressure from the French government, while their joint subsidiary, Natixis, raked in billions. of euros. of losses related to complex US financial products, “subprime” in particular. Impatient, after four months of futile negotiations, the government imposed the controversial appointment of the deputy general secretary of the Élysée, François Pérol, at the helm of the new entity and his own entry into the capital.
• 2009: BNP Paribas and Fortis
The financial crisis led to the dismantling of the Belgian-Dutch insurance bank Fortis. Its subsidiary Fortis Bank, the leading bank in Belgium, was nationalized at the time by the Belgian State, which intended to resell 75% of it to the French banking group BNP Paribas. The transaction was delayed for several months due to opposition from holding company shareholders, but was finally completed in the spring of 2009.
• 2019: Suntrust and BB&T
Regional US banks BB&T and SunTrust created the sixth largest bank in the US in 2019, a deal that was the industry’s biggest marriage since the crisis. A reconciliation “between equals” then valued at 66,000 million dollars, creating a group that weighed more then on the stock market than the European banks Deutsche Bank and Barclays.
• 2023: UBS and Credit Suisse
Credit Suisse had been struggling for two years, weakened by scandals and setbacks. A restructuring plan has not stopped the departure of its depositors for months, and the wind of panic over the sector created by the bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank in the United States on March 10 has won over Credit Suisse, identified as less strong than their rivals. It only took a few days, and all the pressure from the Swiss authorities during a weekend of extraordinary negotiations, for UBS, Switzerland’s largest banking group, to finally agree to buy Crédit Suisse, in exchange for extensive public guarantees and a broken price. .
Source: BFM TV
