LONDON (Reuters) – The Swiss government has done a ‘very good job’ with Credit Suisse’s rescue given circumstances, but the question now is how the takeover settles and how UBS positions itself going forward, Philipp Hildebrand, BlackRock’s vice chairman said on Thursday.
“The question now will be how does this settle, and how does UBS position itself going forward, given quite intense political discussions in Switzerland around competition, around size, and many other issues,” Hildebrand told a Bloomberg conference in Dublin.
UBS, Switzerland’s biggest bank, agreed in March to buy rival Credit Suisse for 3 billion Swiss francs in stock and agreed to assume up to 5 billion francs in losses, in a merger engineered by Swiss authorities to avoid more market-shaking turmoil in global banking.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is a major shareholder in UBS.
“This story is not over but the emphasis has now shifted to what UBS is going to do with it, as opposed to what the government did and I think the government handled it, under very difficult circumstances, very well,” Hildebrand said, referring to Credit Suisse.
Speaking about the broader banking turmoil which saw two U.S. lenders collapse and sizable deposit outflows last month, “there were some serious mistakes made in terms of strategy, in terms of risk management,” Hildebrand said.
“(We’re) going to have to say that our assumptions on liquidity were probably too optimistic and they came out of the 2008 crisis, that we’ll have to revisit that and I’m sure regulators will do that.
(Reporting by Yoruk Bahceli and Padraic Halpin; editing by Dhara Ranasinghe)
