“Big Business” N°116: UBS-Credit Suisse, the heist of the century?

Dear subscribers,

We have not finished taking the measure of the impact that social networks can have, where we expect them, and where we least expect them. We expect them, unfortunately, in the silly or even dangerous challenges that our teenagers set themselves. Barely More Fun: Do you know what the highest breeder dog is today in the United States? The French bulldog, tells us this podcast from The Economist. Ugly, noisy, potentially affected by multiple pathologies and therefore ruinous in veterinary costs, it is still fashionable since stars like Reese Witherspoon and Lady Gaga made it the heroes of their TikTok and Instagram accounts. One example among many others that will feed into the current reflections on the supervision of the activities of influencers.

Evanescent deposits

We expected less the “networks” factor in the financial field. And yet! Remember: two years ago, in January 2021, the phenomenon of “meme stocks”, stocks like GameStop boosted by traders coalescing on the Reddit network, had inflicted monumental losses on certain hedge funds and had almost exploded the Robinhood retail brokerage platform. The speed of online panic has also played an obvious role in the rout of several “big” names in cryptocurrencies, from Terra Luna to the FTX platform.

But now the impact of the networks is now reaching traditional finance. The Internet makes “animal spirits,” as Keynes put it, even more gregarious. The two banking disasters of recent weeks, the bankruptcy of the Silicon Valley Bank and the bailout of Credit Suisse, give a role to these phenomena. In the case of SVB, it was on Slack, WhatsApp, Twitter or Reddit in particular that the rumor spread at full speed, which led the bank’s customers to request the immediate withdrawal of their deposits, with a single gesture. finger on their mobile app, to the tune of $42 billion in just 24 hours. At Credit Suisse, when President Axel Lehmann was asked on Sunday who was “responsible for this disaster?”he has answered “the storm on social networks”. In reference to a…