Meltdown
Greed, Scandal, and the Collapse of Credit Suisse
$66.49
- Hardcover
336 pages
- Release Date
3 March 2025
Summary
The incredible story of a once-venerable Swiss bank that produced a litany of financial scandals and whose collapse reveals the amorality at the heart of the global banking system.
Credit Suisse was a 166-year-old bastion of global banking. But a veneer of high-class service disguised a darker, much dirtier reality. From its sterile Zurich headquarters, Credit Suisse banked dictators and drug dealers, hid stolen Nazi gold, and helped corrupt bankers fleece the firm’s own clients of bi…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781639368693 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1639368698 |
| Author: | Duncan Mavin |
| Publisher: | Pegasus Books |
| Imprint: | Pegasus Books |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 336 |
| Release Date: | 3 March 2025 |
| Weight: | 472g |
| Dimensions: | 31mm x 162mm x 234mm |
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Critics Review
“Duncan Mavin’s gripping account of the bank’s 2023 implosion exposes a crisis decades in the making. The greatest failures of Credit Suisse’s compliance and risk officers are concisely catalogued by Mavin, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor. Meltdown is a page turner.”–Financial Times
“In Meltdown, Duncan Mavin describes the grand rise and ignominious fall of a financial behemoth. This story, capably summarized by Duncan Mavin nicely encapsulates the larger Credit Suisse narrative: Full of petty, pointless squabbles, generally unfolding on the edge of legality, it’s not exactly an epic of corporate hubris, nor quite a morality play of corporate greed, but a procession of lazy grifts and dumb mistakes, repeated for decades.”–New York Times Book Review
“This lucid, tart, and entertaining account offers a window into the grubby chicanery and boneheaded bets that plague high finance.”–Publishers Weekly
“A top business reporter unravels the failure of Credit Suisse. When the once-mighty topple with a thundering crash, there are inevitably questions about how it happened. In the case of the fall of Credit Suisse, Mavin, a respected financial journalist, pulls together evidence from official documents, media reports, and personal interviews to piece together the story. A remarkable account of a complex story.”–Kirkus Reviews
“A gripping account of how the Swiss bank collapsed under the weight of scandal after scandal”–The Times (UK)
“Duncan Mavin is well placed to tell this corporate horror story, having written a book about one of Credit Suisse’s most notorious clients, Lex Greensill, an Australian melon farmer turned fintech champion. Greensill Capital, which employed David Cameron as a Whitehall lobbyist and international frontman, turned out to be a house of cards. Meltdown is a repeat demolition job, a pacy account of Credit Suisse’s rise and fall.”–The Spectator
“Meltdown is an eminently readable survey of Credit Suisse’s tawdry history, and many of the industry’s darker secrets.”–The Telegraph
“A riveting autopsy of Credit Suisse’s dramatic downfall, Mavin’s Meltdown expertly dissects decades of scandal and hubris. This meticulously researched exposé reveals how one of banking’s titans gradually, then suddenly, crumbled under the weight of its own misdeeds.”
–Bradley Hope, New York Times bestselling author of Billion Dollar Whale and Blood and Oil
“Duncan Mavin’s engaging, authoritative indictment of Credit Suisse is a cavalcade of scandals, crises, and chronic management failures fueled by a pervasively rotten culture. Meltdown is a sensational page-turner, even if you sometimes feel like looking away in disgust from the illegality, amorality, depravity and greed that defined this pillar of global high finance for decades until its collapse.”–Sean Silcoff, author of Losing the Signal
“Pulling no punches and naming names, Mavin lays out an almost comically scandalous story with dry humour, connecting the granular details of how it happened to the big picture - a decades-long saga of corporate folly. Swiss bank secrecy laws emerge as the villain, protecting over-rated, unaccountable executives from scrutiny of their actions until it was too late for anyone to save them from the consequences.”–Andy Verity, BBC Economics correspondent and author of Rigged
Duncan Mavin
Duncan Mavin is a veteran international financial journalist. He has been a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and was the WSJ’s Financial Editor for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He has also been Managing Editor for Barron’s Group and is the UK bestselling author of the Lex Greensill exposé Pyramid of Lies. Meltdown is his first book to be published in America.
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