The recently severely shaken share price of the major Swiss bank Credit Suisse (CS) received tailwind from two sides on Friday.

On the one hand, the scandal-plagued bank announced that it would buy back its own bonds worth around 3 billion francs.

On the other hand, the rating agency S&P Global confirmed its previous assessment of the long- and short-term issuer ratings of the group for the time being.

As a result, the CS share price rose by 7 percent on Friday to CHF 4.50.

John Knight

Correspondent for politics and economy in Switzerland.

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At the beginning of the week, the stock fell to a record low of CHF 3.61 after wild speculation on social media about an imminent collapse of the second largest Swiss bank.

Of course, such a thing is not imminent.

On October 27th, the management wants to inform about the strategic realignment, with which the loss-making group should be brought back on track.

Until then, the rumor mill should continue to bubble.

With the announced repurchase of debt securities, the bank is trying to bring some calm to the heated situation.

CS is thus sending the signal that it has sufficient liquidity.

The bank is setting a positive sign in the midst of the crisis, said Andreas Venditti, analyst at Bank Vontobel, to the FAZ Venditti is reminded of the actions of Deutsche Bank, which launched a bond buyback of 5 billion euros in 2016.

At that time, the German industry leader was under the same pressure as Credit Suisse is today.

The new CFO of Credit Suisse, Dixit Joshi, also comes from Deutsche Bank.

He took up his duties in Zurich last Monday.

Venditti believes that the buyback of the bonds denominated in euros, pounds and dollars should bring CS a small profit.

The bonds are currently trading at a significant discount.

However, it is unclear how many bond investors ultimately tendered their titles to the bank.

CS itself stated that interest expense would decrease as a result of the buyback.

Meanwhile, S&P is leaving the outlook for all CS ratings at “negative”.

This reflects the risk that the planned repositioning of the bank will not quickly bring the expected income.

"We believe that economic uncertainties and market volatility could make the upcoming restructuring of the group's loss-making businesses more difficult than previously anticipated, with the risk of delaying a recovery in customer and investor confidence," writes the rating agency.

The gap to the competition in terms of the risk/return profile will continue to widen.

CS will benefit from rising net interest margins.

But restructuring costs and higher funding costs, as well as the declining revenue base as a result of de-risking, limit the potential for profitability improvement over the next two years.

The group's business transformation presents significant short-term challenges that the new management must quickly overcome in order to align the bank to a more stable and reasonably successful operating model.