Geneva, 11 apr. The Chamber of Deputies of the Swiss Parliament today rejected public aid to save Credit Suisse and that the UBS bank agreed to acquire that establishment before its foreseeable collapse, in a vote in which it distanced itself from the position adopted hours before by the Senate, where the measure was approved.
The decision must now return to the Upper House, but even if its members changed their minds and now rejected the credit package, this would not have much consequence nor would it be applied retroactively since the aid is formally committed and was authorized through an emergency procedure. by a Parliamentary Finance Delegation.
For this reason, the parliamentary debate has been perceived above all as an opportunity for legislators to express themselves, which they did by rejecting by 102 votes to 71 the loan of 100 billion euros and the guarantee against losses of 9 billion euros that it offered. the Swiss Confederation.
The position adopted by the deputies has been understood as a disapproval of the way in which the government dealt with the Credit Suisse crisis, whose bankruptcy would have had unpredictable consequences for the Swiss banking system as a whole.
During the debate it was recalled that already in 2008 – when the State had to come to the aid of UBS, which had been dragged to the brink of the precipice by the financial crisis of that year – a solution to the concept of “too big to fail” had been demanded. (too big to fail), which was considered very troublesome.
Accordingly, UBS and Credit Suisse were part of about thirty banks of systemic importance for the world economy, for which reason they could not fail in any case.
Several parliamentarians considered that there should be no banks in Switzerland that fall into this category.
In other interventions, several speakers supported the revision of the “too big to fail” regulation and others called for strengthening the powers of the Swiss financial market supervisory body.
The most repeated comments were against Credit Suisse executives who failed to come up with solutions to the bank’s multiple problems, from ongoing litigation that forced it to pay billions of dollars in fines in recent years to corruption scandals in which his collaborators were involved.
The day before, the Upper House of the Swiss Parliament endorsed the financial guarantee offered by the State in the Credit Suisse case and will now debate the issue again after the rejection in the Lower House. EFE
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