Global thoughts on a resilient safety-net: preliminary lessons to learn from the recent bank crises in the US and Switzerland

Over the first months of 2023, three rather large US banks and one Swiss G-SIB collapsed. Interestingly, in each of these cases an attempt was made to deviate (more or less remarkably) from the application of the regime created in response to the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 and based on the assumption that shareholders and creditors should be the ones bearing losses. This paper discusses such recent cases, with a view to identifying some key lessons to learn, focusing on the main causes triggering those crises, the unwanted consequences of fighting inflation on the banking system, and the inherent interaction between increasing interest rates for monetary policy purposes and accounting rules applicable to banks.