The travails of UBS

摘要

After two big restructurings in the past few weeks, in private banking and asset management, ubs's profits were unlikely to be wonderful. They were not. On March 9th, Switzerland's largest bank and Europe's third-biggest by assets, announced net profits of SFr 6.3 billion ($4.2 billion) for its latest financial year. These results were twice as good as the previous year's; but those included having to write off, among other things, a disastrous investment in Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that almost went bust in September 1998. And the increase was driven by a huge rise in trading profits. The bank's shares duly fell again, ubs, formed by the merger of the old Union Bank of Switzerland (ubs) with the smaller Swiss Bank Corporation (sbc), remains a directionless and unhappy institution. The bank's boss, Marcel Ospel, is under fire. Its myriad problems, Deutsche Bank might care to note, date back to that merger.