Warnings have emerged of a wider banking collapse on the backs of the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank, with a financial expert who predicted the 2008 financial crisis warning that Credit Suisse may be the next to fall after the Swiss bank’s shares fell to an all-time low on Tuesday.
Switzerland’s second-largest bank, Credit Suisse, saw its shares fall by five per cent in early trading on Tuesday to a record low for the company after confirming some $8 billion (£6.6 billion) in losses in 2022 and admitting that there was “material weakness” in its accounting system for financial reports.
The bank’s books were thrown into question last week after the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) contacted Credit Suisse to warn that it was in jeopardy of providing a misstatement over the accounting of cashflows in 2019 and 2020, forcing the bank to delay its annual report until this week, The Times of London reported.
On Tuesday, Credit Suisse claimed that the “weakness” in its books resulted from a “failure to design and maintain an effective risk assessment process to identify and analyze the risk of material misstatements”.
Credit Suisse CEO Ulrich Koerner said that the troubles facing the bank were unrelated to the collapse of the failed Silicon Valley Bank, telling Bloomberg that “SVB credit exposure is not material,” and adding: “It’s a very different situation, we are following materially different and higher standards when it comes to capital funding, liquidity and so on.”
However, there are growing concerns that the Swiss bank being could the second shoe to drop in a potential wider banking collapse. In comments provided to Breitbart London, Irish macroeconomist Philip Pilkington said that it “looks increasingly like a possible general meltdown of banks. Losses on bonds and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) are huge. Credit Suisse may just be amongst the weaker members of the pack.”
American entrepreneur and author Robert Kiyosaki, who correctly predicted the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, which sparked a global financial crisis, has also raised alarm bells over Credit Suisse’s situation.
“The problem is the bond market, and my prediction, I called Lehman Brothers years ago, and I think the next bank to go is Credit Suisse because the bond market is crashing,” Kiyosaki told Fox Business on Monday. “The bond market is much bigger than the stock market. The Fed is up and they’re the firemen and the arson.”
“The US dollar is losing its hegemony in the world right now. So they’re going to print more and more and more of this… trying to keep this thing from sinking.”
“The [Federal Reserve] and the [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] are signalling hyperinflation which makes gold and silver even better because [the dollar] is trash. They are going to print more and more of this fake money. This is what the Fed and the FDIC are signalling, that we are going to print as much of this as possible to keep the crash from accelerating, but they are the guys causing it,” Kiyosaki added.
In an emergency move to shore up the U.S. banking system over the weekend, the U.S. government announced it would guarantee all deposits at SVB and Signature Bank, including those that exceed the $250,000 limit on deposit insurance. Over 90 percent of deposits at SVB were larger than the insured deposit cap.
The government is also trying to find a buyer for SVB’s deposits, likely one of the major U.S. banks, yet so far a buyer has not been found.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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