Under pressure, the first Swiss bank UBS came to the rescue of its counterpart Credit Suisse on Sunday, which it will buy. The acquisition aims to appease the markets and joins the list of mergers and acquisitions that have marked the banking sector since the great financial crisis of 2008, and of which here are the main ones:
– JPMorganChase/Bear Stearns puis Washington Mutual (2008)
During the financial crisis of 2008, JPMorganChase first bought the big investment bank Bear Stearns in March 2008, then Washington Mutual in September 2008. acquisitions made during the crisis. This strategy had enabled the institution to become the leading American bank in terms of assets ahead of Bank of America and Citigroup.
– Barclays/Lehman Brothers (2008)
Driven by the collapse of its stock market and the drying up of its financing, Lehman Brothers was placed in September 2008 under the protection of American bankruptcy law (Chapter 11). The bank was completely broken up, seeing its best bits scavenged for cheap by various competitors.
The British Barclays quickly recovered a large part of the American activities, that is to say 72 billion dollars of assets for 1.75 billion dollars – without counting the New York headquarters of the bank.
The Japanese financial group Nomura has for its part taken over part of Lehman in Europe and Asia.
– Bank of America/Merrill Lynch (2009)
At the height of the financial turmoil, Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch for $44.4 billion. Merrill Lynch had accepted its takeover to avoid experiencing 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 billion dollars in deposits, ahead of JPMorganChase, which had 900 billion.
– Caisse d’Epargne/Banque Populaire (2009)
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 was accelerated under pressure from the French government, while their joint subsidiary Natixis was accumulating billion euros of losses related to complex American financial products, “subprime” in particular.
Impatient, after four months of futile negotiations, the government imposed the controversial appointment of the deputy secretary general of the Elysée François Pérol at the head of the new group and its own entry into the capital.
– BNP Paribas/Fortis (2009)
The financial crisis led to the dismantling of the Belgian-Dutch bank-insurer 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 operation was delayed for several months by the opposition of shareholders of the holding company, but was finally completed in the spring of 2009.
– Suntrust/BB&T (2019)
Regional U.S. banks BB&T and SunTrust gave birth to the sixth-largest U.S. bank in 2019, a deal that was the industry’s biggest marriage since the crisis. A reconciliation “between equals” then valued at 66 billion dollars, creating a group then weighing more on the stock market than the European banks Deutsche Bank and Barclays.
– UBS/Credit Suisse (2023)
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 on 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 stronger than its 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 Credit Suisse, with broad public guarantees and a broken price.
