UBS Has Something To Get Off Its Chest

Author:
Updated:
Original:

I don't know about you but I feel like it's been forever since we've heard from our favorite Swiss bank (no offense to Credit Suisse, but you're going to have to get up a lot earlier to perpetrate enough fraud to worm your way into our heart). So this feels good:

UBS is set to announce the biggest corporate loss in the country's history, running into billions of dollars, a newspaper reported Sunday. The German language newspaper Sonntag reported UBS would record an overall loss in 2008 of CHF20 billion ($18 billion) -- despite showing a profit of CHF296 million in the third quarter -- when it reports results on Feb. 10. Sonntag reported the bank racked up CHF8 billion in losses in the final quarter of 2008, bringing the total for the year to CHF20 billion UBS admitted in the fall, when it announced third-quarter results, that it had been hit hard by the global financial crisis and warned it could lose up to CHF5 billion in the final quarter.


UBS To Report Record Loss For 2008 [Dow Jones]

Related

News

Layoffs Watch '12: UBS Has Something To Share

Management has decided to burn the investment bank down and start fresh. Basically. UBS is set to unveil a radical downsizing of its struggling investment bank next week in a move that will prompt the loss of up to 10,000 jobs across the Swiss banking group. Switzerland’s largest bank by assets will significantly shrink the trading side and complexity of its investment bank and as a consequence also cut thousands of jobs in its back office over the next few years, three people close to the situation said. The job cuts will amount to almost a sixth of the bank’s workforce of 63,500 at the end of June. They will not happen all at once and the precise number is still unclear... It comes on top of another – still ongoing – programme announced last year to cut 3,500 jobs. The new strategy, hammered out in several executive board meetings in New York this week and set to be announced next Tuesday, will lead to the closure of a sizeable part of UBS’s fixed-income trading operations and other capital-intensive areas of the investment bank. UBS To Cut Up To 10,000 Jobs [FT] Related: UBS’s Investment Banking Head May Have To Slash His Own Expenses “Like A Jewish Shopkeeper”