Meltdown by Duncan Mavin: 4 star review

As the threat of Nazism began to loom over Europe in the 1930s, a Polish-Jewish businessman named Joseph Sapir traveled to three different banking centers—London, Paris, and Geneva—to deposit money in an attempt to protect a part of his family’s wealth. He gave his daughter Estelle the details of the various accounts in case anything happened to her.

Joseph died in the Majdanek concentration camp and Estelle joined the resistance. After the war, in 1946, she visited the banks her father had told her about. The British and French handed over the money to her family. The Swiss asked to see Joseph’s death certificate. Oh, indeed, Estelle countered, and who would one ask for such a document: Hitler, Himmler or Eichmann? It was of no use. She eventually left, screaming in frustration, but returned to try again that year, then again in 1957, then again nearly four decades later in 1996.

The Swiss bank, which had become by then Credit Suisseit did so only in 1998. Even then, it did so only under considerable political pressure from the US and after a series of investigations found that Estella Sapir’s story had been repeated elsewhere, time and time again. “It was not the mistake of an ill-informed or over-the-top Credit Suisse bank official,” writes Duncan Mavin in Meltdown: Scandal, Sleaze and The Collapse of Credit Suisse. “That was politics.”

Under the cover of Swiss bank secrecy laws, Credit Suisse and others were apparently charging fees for hundreds of thousands of accounts – quite possibly a million of them – that belonged to them. victims of the Holocaustand their methodical drain of funds. This was the same institution that had happily opened accounts for well-known Nazis and one Benito Mussolini.

First of all, there’s no getting away from it: Meltdown is about banks, especially Swiss banks, and Credit Suisse in particular. The number of people whose boats such a subject would naturally float could probably fit into a small boat. Don’t let that discourage you. Banks are important: If money makes the world go round, banks decide how fast it goes. They also tend, as the above anecdote demonstrates, to behave extremely badly.

A lot of what they do is couched in deliberately arcane language to make sure you get bored quickly and don’t learn much. But Meltdown is an eminently readable study of Credit Suisse’s storied history and the industry’s many darker secrets. Mavin, a longtime financial journalist at the Wall Street Journal and now Bloomberg, guides laymen through banking terms and arcane. It has a light touch: Michael Lewis didn’t need it Margot Robbie he’s drinking champagne in a bubble bath to explain this thing, and neither is Mavin. What it best illustrates is that banks are, like all institutions, human inventions and therefore susceptible to the failings and foibles of those who run them – be it excessive ambition, arrogance or, yes, avarice.