Credit Suisse, founded as Schweizerische Kreditanstalt by Alfred Escher in 1856, was once an engine of Switzerland’s modernisation, funding both railways and infrastructure. However, by the time of its collapse last year, the bank had become a national embarrassment. In Meltdown, Duncan Mavin charts how a Swiss national champion was brought down by a rogues’ gallery of entitled bankers, many of whom were so obsessed with the size of their next bonus that they didn’t really care whether the bank survived in the long term or whether customers were fleeced.

One of the earliest scandals to beset the bank was the Chiasso affair of the 1970s. Named after a town in southern Switzerland near the Italian border, this saw the bank facilitate money laundering and tax fraud on a grand scale for wealthy Italian clients, resulting in losses of $800 million. After the scandal, Mavin says, there ‘wasn’t much soul-searching’. This is a theme of the book: whenever the bank was rocked by a scandal, it didn’t seem keen to learn any lessons, often preferring to deny wrongdoing, obstruct inquiries and hide or shred evidence.

In the aftermath of the Chiasso affair, Credit Suisse focused on international expansion, notably in the United States. In 1978, it partnered with First Boston, a high-energy US investment bank, in which it took a controlling stake in 1988. The move, Mavin argues, marked the beginning of the bank’s downward