The Swiss government has done a “very good job” with the rescue of Credit Suisse given the circumstances, but the question now is how the acquisition will be arranged and how UBS will position itself in the future, said Philipp Hildebrand, vice chairman of BlackRock, on Thursday. “The question now is how this is regulated and how UBS is positioning itself further, given the rather heated political discussions in Switzerland about competition, size and many other issues,” Hildebrand said at a Bloomberg conference in Dublin. UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank, agreed in March to acquire rival Credit Suisse for 3 billion Swiss francs in shares and agreed to take on 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 of 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 has done and I think the government has handled it, under very difficult circumstances, very well,” Hildebrand said, referring to Credit Suisse. On the broader turmoil in banking, with two U.S. lenders toppling and significant outflows last month, Hildebrand said, ” serious mistakes have been made in terms of strategy and risk management. “We will have to say that our assumptions about liquidity were probably too optimistic and that they came out of the 2008 crisis”.
