UBS got Credit Suisse for almost nothing

Of course to show them to you we would have to shut them off.

It's displayed in the open, and it's called hollywood.

Those economic ties were broken the moment Russia started threatening to cut off the gas unless Germany did what they wanted, which took about 3 days and escalated over the next several months. It has been transparently clear for a decade that Germany was the one being "roped" by Russia, not the one "roping" Russia.

Putin has been invading his neighbours since 2008 and finally launched a full scale war.

How would you say that is “roping in Russia”?

US: Hey Germany, you shouldn't be so reliant on Russian NG/Oil (buy ours instead)

Germany: We're ok, thank you for your concern

Russia: cuts back NG/Oil going through pipelines to Germany

US: Let's just make that permanent. Germany doesn't know what's good for itself. Boom. Hey Germany, now that you can't get it from Russia, would you like to buy some of ours? We've been telling you, ahem, warning you, for years, friend.

What's more plausible, that the party that routinely blows up warehouses and murders people on NATO soil did it, or the party that has kept Germany safe for more than 70 years did it?

"The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. "

-- George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism (1945)

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

I also said fat profits, which generally encompasses all business activity.

> How does total comp track with jobs at other industries with similar requirements?

This is the only factor that matters, but I’d guess most bankers are over-compensated generally given the contributions made to society.

I understand what you are saying. I understand that every single thing a person gets is compensation, whether bonuses, healthcare, paid vacations, sick days, everything is part of the compensation.

It's not really even about Credit Suisse. It's about worldwide C-suite compensation. It is disgusting.

I did just look at comparisons between USA CEOs to European and Japanese, and America is a horror show compared to them. This is CEOs so I'm not sure how the entire C-suite or top executives would fare against the same in America - maybe European companies spread it out more evenly to top-level executives.

https://www.wtwco.com/en-US/Insights/2020/12/ceo-pay-landsca...

But if the $3.2 billion per year in bonuses still went to the top 20 people, it is essentially the same, at least to me.

But I do know the USA better, so I will comment to that even though Credit Suisse is Euro. For example, Tim Cook of Apple made $100 million in 2021, not including $754 million in stock shares. Cook "voluntarily" took a "cut" in compensation to $50 million per year this year. Oh, thanks, Tim. But is Tim Cook going to quit and do nothing if he was paid $5 million all along? Yeah, maybe now he would, given that he is a billionaire, but if from the start, no he would not quit, nor stop working as hard. People are motivated by more than money. They will take it, of course, who wouldn't?

Nobody, but nobody, needs that much money. How many pairs of shoes and pants does one need? And I use shoes and pants metaphorically. How much shit does one need?

And partly, or mostly, it is driven by boards of directors, who make $300K or $400K or whatever it is per year by going to 4 meetings per year. Not bad job, if you can get it. Just looked it up - Harvard Law School report says it is $290K for large cap, $217K for medium cap, and $164K for small. These board of directors are always high executive levels and KNOW if they as a group across the USA vote the average CEO and C-suite higher compensation, they will eventually get it too, so it is a conflict of interest that screw over the shareholders, and all other workers who are down the chain.

In the 1960s, CEO compensation was 60 times the average worker, or 6,000%. Not bad. Now it is 350 times the average worker, or 35,000% more.

From the beginning of income tax, for most of USA history, the tax rate was 70-90% on the top tax bracket. It came down to 50% when Reagan was elected in 1980, and then down to about 35% in 1986 and stayed there until present. Guess when the inequalities between the richest 10% and the other 90% started occuring...you guessed it, in 1986. you get a 35-55% tax break, you tend to make more money, kinda sorta.

As a matter of fact, the only time that the income tax level went down to the richest tax bracket was in the late 1920s....and then the market collapse happened and the Great Depression happened...correlation, or causation...I vote causation. And the exact same scenario is playing out now. Unmitigated greed is happening.

And what happened is that when the wealthy hit the top tax bracket, there was no reason to earn more. Their salary was capped, in essense. And that is why CEO compensation was only 6000% more than the average worker.

People make the bogus argument that the best won't then work. That's totally wrong, as the best don't work for compensation. They work for competition. And what else are they going to do if tax is at 70-90%? Sit around and do nothing? They still have to send kids to college and pay mortgages. And everyone else is subject to the same restrictions. And when we had the higher top tax bracket, that is when "normal" people had lower tuitions paid for by the public, hospital costs were less, etc. And I've read all the other "reasons" for what others say is the reason for price raises in everything, but I don't buy them.

Why should even a small business owner make $5 million a year while providing bronze health insurance, with super high deductables to his or her employees, when maybe if the owner could take $5 million and get everyone gold level health care?

There's a LOT more I could say but this is enough. I don't have time to write more.

But, to sum up, the CEO and entire executive class makes too much money and it needs to be reined in.

Sorry I wrote so much. It's a topic that causes steam to rise from my skull. :P

Gambling means you have guaranteed net negative return because you’re against the house and the rules of the house are designed in such a way, mathematically speaking.

Trading mortgages, financing a building, betting that an airline will have a bad quarter after the first WW lockdowns of covid, can have a net positive return. you are playing player vs player and you bet and structure the trades trying to get the odds in your favor.

they’re two different things, you just seem ignorant.

not to mention other uses of finance such as edging. farmers, companies of sll kinds, even countries, want and should edge their wipe outs and black swan events type of risks for example. and a Citedel will happily underwrite your options.

Thanks. That's a fascinating idea.

I've always found it odd that a person can buy stocks in both Microsoft and Google, for example, or both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo at the same time.

For regular non-filthy-rich people it won't affect anything, but it is very interesting to think about with institutional investing. What does it mean when competitors have some level of shared ownership?

Incompetent criminals don't get paid. And you don't hear about the competent ones.

Although you may not find it likely, that is sort of the case. Bond prospectuses are very long (100s of pages sometimes) and complicated with tons and tons of boilerplate language so most people focus on exactly 1 page of that (the "waterfall" describing payout and loss priorities).[1] Things like under what circumstances an instrument will convert are sometimes very complicated and people like Elliot Capital have basically made a career out of actually doing the homework and figuring this out better than everyone else. You can bet all sides have teams of securities lawyers pouring over the conditions of conversion of every single coco bond out there and these most of all.

Part of the calculus for AT1/Coco bonds seems to have been that investors thought the bonds would basically never convert (and were certainly not pricing in the likelihood of being wiped out in this way) so they were getting paid for nothing. That is why the coco bond market has been so spooked by this. Some investors have been saying the cbanks have made a mistake because noone will ever buy AT1 bonds again, but cbanks seem to have gone off the whole AT1 idea and would prefer just real normal tier 1 capital instead so probably wouldn't mind that outcome too much.

[1] Real life example: I was involved in the structuring of a bond and after a team of us working on it for 6 months and having poured over the prospectus through multiple drafts, after it had been in investors hands for 6 months we disagreed with lawyers about a very basic point (whether there were physical bond certificates or not) and ended up being wrong (there were - stuck in a custodian vault somewhere).

The pay out is nothing to sneeze at - I have some perpetual bonds that pay a coupon of 6.5%. In some rare cases they are slightly riskier than stocks (remember, Credit Suisse shareholders still lost 90%), but unless a major crisis occurs they are still safer than bonds. A 6-7% interest unless a major crisis occurs seems like a decent deal for a small part of my portfolio.

Is that a common structure? Seems a bit odd to me to want a backer for the middle bit, but I suppose be so confident that it won't be worse than that that you're happy with the tail?

But perhaps after some point, since UBS is too big to fail, the Swiss National Bank will again back UBS indefinitely.

In other words: UBS 5 billion then Swiss National Bank 9 billion then UBS as long as they can and finally Swiss National Bank the rest.

It may be more conventional in the US. But yes, especially on words like 'be', & 'its' makes it read very 'Oh My God You Will Not Believe These 6 Reasons ...' to me.

> and the headline position is reasoned.

Huh? Doesn't it reinforce the point that UBS paid quite a lot for Credit Suisse?

I don't agree in this case, but you can absolutely find something interesting yet also think it could be better, in any number of ways but including if it was denser.