Game Over - Der Fall der Credit Suisse
Simon Helbling, Switzerland, 2025o
On 19 March 2023, the unimaginable happened: following a historic bank run, Credit Suisse, a symbol of Swiss stability and security, collapsed. The globally systemically important bank had been working with tax evaders and dictators since the 1970s, gambling away billions in investment banking and yet awarding its bosses ludicrous salaries. How could it have come to this?
First things first: from an aesthetic point of view, this chronicle of scandals involving Switzerland's second-largest bank, which collapsed in 2023 after 167 years of history and a dramatic bank run, sometimes resorts to tabloid devices such as gratuitously obscured locations and hastily inserted graphics. But the film has substance. Tamedia banking specialist and screenwriter Arthur Rutishauser, a journalist from the Financial Times and a Stanford professor explain in a factual and compelling way how mismanagement took hold when the former SKA lost its first few hundred million in the Chiasso affair of the 1970s due to the illegal practices of a single branch, and how, since deregulation in the 1980s, ever-increasing sums have been gambled away in investment banking or the finally punished business with tax evaders. Numerous other experts and former employees complete this chorus about the greed and megalomania, the arrogance and the incorrigibility in the upper echelons of CS.
Whether the accumulated management errors were really the nails in the bank's coffin or whether the corruptibility of top managers is simply as much a part of the money business as worms are part of apples remains open. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the hope expressed at the end of the film that the profiteers will be prosecuted will remain a pipe dream, and the principle of ‘too big to fail’ an illusion.
Andreas Furler