Meltdown by Duncan Mavin: 4 star review

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

Joseph died in the Majdanek concentration camp, and Estelle joined the resistance movement. After the war, in 1946, she visited the banks her father had told her about. The English and French gave money to her family. The Swiss demanded to show Joseph’s death certificate. “Oh really,” Estelle protested, “and who should she ask for such a document: Hitler, Himmler or Eichmann?” It was useless. She eventually left, screaming in frustration, but returned to try again that year, then again in 1957, and then again nearly four decades later, in 1996.

The Swiss bank, which at that time became Credit Suissethrew out the money of the Sapirs only in 1998. Even then, he only did so under considerable political pressure from the US, and after a series of investigations it was found that Estelle Sapir’s story had been repeated elsewhere, time and time again. “This was not some mistake by an ill-informed or over-official Credit Suisse bank clerk,” writes Duncan Mavin in Control: Scandal, Dishonor and the Collapse of Credit Suisse. “It was politics.”

Under cover of Swiss bank secrecy laws, it appears Credit Suisse and others were charging fees to hundreds of thousands of accounts – quite possibly a million of them – belonging to victims of the Holocaustand methodically extracting funds from them. It was the same institution that happily opened accounts for famous Nazis and the likes of Benito Mussolini.

First, there’s no getting around this: the Meltdown is about banks, especially Swiss banks, and Credit Suisse in particular. The number of people in whose boats such an object could float would probably fit in a small boat. Don’t let this discourage you. Banks matter: If money makes the world go round, banks decide how fast it goes. They also have a tendency, as the above anecdote demonstrates, to behave extremely badly.

Much of what they do is couched in deliberately cryptic language to ensure you get bored quickly and don’t absorb too much. But Meltdown is a highly readable examination of Credit Suisse’s sordid history and the industry’s many dark secrets. Mavin, a longtime financial journalist for the Wall Street Journal and now Bloomberg, guides the layman through banking terms and secrets. He has a light touch: Michael Lewis didn’t need one Margot Robbie drinking champagne in a bubble bath to explain it, and so does Mavyn. What he illustrates best is that banks, like all institutions, are human inventions and therefore susceptible to the failings and failings of those who run them – be it over-ambition, arrogance or, yes, avarice.