Archegos
|
Risk Anatomy™
|
No. It’s still too soon.
Later...
It is no longer too soon, for now the Credit Suisse Special Committee to the Board of Directors has presented its Report on Archegos Capital Management dated July 29, 2021 to the board and, for some reason known only to the board, they have published to it to the known world.
This is an act for which the watching world should feel tremendously grateful, for it is not only a sizzling read, arriving just in time for Bank executives as they head for a fortnight to the beaches of Mykonos and the sun loungers of Ibiza, it is a systematic, coruscating, dismembering of pretty much the entire structure of investment banking as we know it. This is a proper horror story. Stephen King has not a patch on this. And while the goings on at Credit Suisse were truly breathtakingly chaotic — it is hard to credit any one organisation could really have made all of these unforgivable errors, in such scale, and not caught even one lucky break as the apocalypse unfolded — the makings of all these joint and several catastrophes live in every organisation in the industry, and any who denies it is showing precisely the lack of awareness that nearly sank Credit Suisse.
The Special Committee makes a number of excellent recommendations — all worth heeding — but stops short of the one that must have been most tempting to the Board: get out of prime services business all together.