The structure and volume of the Credit Suisse bond buyback is secondary.
The only thing that counts for the counted Swiss money house is the signal that needs to be sent: We are capable of acting.
The market received the signals with joy.
The battered share price increased.
Crises never play by the rules, the timing is always bad.
However, the Credit Suisse crisis comes at a completely inopportune time, as worries about war, energy and recession weigh heavily on the global economy.
It is only logical that memories of the Lehman moment are coming back, when the American investment bank collapsed and became a symbol of the financial crisis.
Nobody knows where the next crisis will come from.
Credit Suisse's weakness, however, is not a second Lehman.
The crisis is too local, the banks as a whole are in a completely different state than they were in 2008. If there is a comparison, it would be with Deutsche Bank, which in 2018 – long since written off by many observers – wanted to regain the reins of action: with bond buybacks.
Credit Suisse's CFO, who has just started, comes from Deutsche Bank.