UBS Pays US$300 Million to settle Credit Suisse mortgage case
An agreement between the DOJ and a Credit Suisse subsidiary had been reached 'to resolve all outstanding Consumer Relief Obligations under the 2017 settlement by paying US$300 million,' UBS said in a statement on Monday (Aug 4).
UBS is working through a list of legacy legal issues inherited from Credit Suisse, which it bought in an emergency rescue in 2023. In May, UBS agreed to pay US$511 million to settle a US investigation into how Credit Suisse Group helped rich Americans evade taxes.
A number of lenders had faced claims over the sale of mortgage securities that plummeted in value during the 2008 financial crisis. The banks faced allegations that they misrepresented the quality of the home loans underpinning these securities in order to win buyers, exacerbating the impact of the sub-prime mortgage collapse.
In 2023, UBS agreed to pay US$1.44 billion to settle its own long-running case over US mortgage-backed securities, which was one of the bank's biggest legal headaches at the time.
UBS said that as a result of Monday's announcement it expects to recognise a credit in its third quarter earnings in the bank's non-core unit as a result of the release of the contingent liability. BLOOMBERG

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Times
34 minutes ago
- Business Times
The crypto crises are coming
HAVING adopted one major piece of digital-currency legislation (the Genius Act) and with more pending (the Clarity Act has passed the House of Representatives), the United States is poised to become a major hub for cryptocurrency-related activities, or even – taking President Donald Trump literally – the 'crypto capital of the world'. But those who support the new legislation should be careful what they wish for. Unfortunately, the crypto industry has acquired so much political power – primarily through political donations – that the Genius Act and the Clarity Act have been designed to prevent reasonable regulation. The result will most likely be a boom-bust cycle of epic proportions. Historically, US financial markets' major advantage compared to other countries has been relatively greater transparency, which enables investors to gain a deeper understanding of risks and make better-informed decisions. The US also has strict rules against conflicts of interest, requirements to treat investors fairly (including by protecting their assets in proper custody arrangements), and limits on how much risk many financial firms can take. Sensible laws This framework is not an accident or something that emerged purely through market competition. Rather, it is the result of sensible laws and regulations that were created during the 1930s (after a major disaster) and that have evolved in a reasonable fashion since then. These rules are the major reason why it is so easy in the US to do business, to bring new ideas to market, and to raise capital to support innovation of all kinds. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Any individual entrepreneur or even a potential new industry (such as crypto) may baulk at these rules, claiming that they are different from anything the world has ever seen. But financial innovation involves risks for the entire financial system, not just for individual investors. The point of regulation is to protect the whole. Many major economies – including the US – learned this the hard way. Over the past 200 years, they have experienced severe financial disruptions and even systemic meltdowns. One such collapse was a major contributor to the Great Depression, which began with a stock market crash in 1929 and spilled over to bring down many banks (and other investments), destroying millions of Americans' wealth and dreams. Avoiding a repeat of that experience has long been an important policy goal. But the Genius Act does not advance this goal. The law creates a framework for stablecoins, an important emerging digital asset, issued by US and foreign firms, that purports to maintain a stable value against a particular currency or commodity, with the US dollar being the most popular anchor. Stablecoins are useful to investors active in cryptocurrency trading, enabling them to move into and out of particular crypto assets without having to navigate the traditional (non-crypto) financial system. We should expect significant demand, including from non-financial firms, such as Walmart and Amazon, seeking to bypass established payment systems. The business model of stablecoin issuers is to capture the spread between what they pay on their currencies (which is zero interest under this legislation) and what they can receive when they invest their reserves, just like a bank. Source of vulnerability All the incentives for stablecoin issuers are to invest at least some of their reserves in riskier assets to get higher returns. This will be a major source of vulnerability, particularly when issuers are licensed by permissive state authorities. Indeed, from a systemic perspective, the Genius Act's main shortcoming is its failure to deal effectively with the inherent risk of stablecoin runs, because it prevents regulators from prescribing strong capital, liquidity and other safeguards. And when any stablecoin issuer – domestic or foreign – gets into trouble, who will step in, and with what authority, to prevent the problems from spreading to the real economy, like in the 1930s? Simply applying the bankruptcy code to failed stablecoin issuers will inevitably impose severe costs on investors, including prolonged delays in receiving what's left of their money. It will almost certainly exacerbate runs on other stablecoin issuers. Moreover, if the Genius Act's goals include preserving the US dollar as the world's reserve currency and boosting demand for Treasuries (as stated by its advocates), why does Section 15 of the law allow foreign issuers to invest their reserves in assets such as their own country's (risky) government debt, even if that debt is not denominated in dollars? We should expect foreign regulators to condone or even favor such arrangements. But then we will have 'stablecoins' with fixed dollar obligations, backed in significant part by non-dollar assets – and one can easily imagine what a big appreciation in the value of the dollar will do to such arrangements (spoiler alert: immediate liquidity problems, insolvency fears and destabilising runs). There is a lot more trouble to come, particularly if any version of the Clarity Act passes the Senate. This legislation would allow conflicts of interest and self-dealing on a scale not allowed since the 1920s. There are also major national security concerns, to the extent that both the Genius Act and the Clarity Act allow or even facilitate the continued use of stablecoins (and crypto more broadly) in illicit financial transactions. The US may well become the crypto capital of the world and, under its emerging legislative framework, a few rich people will surely get richer. But in its eagerness to do the crypto industry's bidding, the Congress has exposed Americans and the world to the real possibility of the return of financial panic and severe economic damage, implying massive job losses and wealth destruction. PROJECT SYNDICATE The writer, a 2024 Nobel laureate in economics and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the co-author (with Daron Acemoglu) of Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, 2023).
Business Times
a day ago
- Business Times
Why Asia's ‘scamdemic' is everyone's problem
What do a Chinese actor, an Illinois widow and a young Vietnamese man have in common? They're all victims of scams – once an annoying and seemingly random crime that has scaled up into a global business that cost the world US$1 trillion last year. The breadth of the industry stretches far and wide, stemming from forced labour gulags in the grey-zone borderlands of South-east Asia. This is a crisis run by international crime syndicates that no single nation can solve, despite many previous efforts. Ending it will require the US and China to put rivalry aside and cooperate in a region where they both exercise huge influence. The alternative? This shadowy industry will only grow bolder, and harder to stop. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio highlighted why clamping down is essential during the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations gathering in Kuala Lumpur last month. Victims, he said, include both Americans and Asians. He indicated that more measures to address the issue would be discussed in their next gathering in October, ahead of a summit to be attended by President Donald Trump. Washington should treat this as an urgent priority in a region where it has so many key allies and partners. South-east Asia is ground zero for what is being called a 'scamdemic'. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has pointed to Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines as centres of this global fraud. Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked and forced into working these scams. Most are men from Asia, but some have come from as far away as Africa and Latin America. Many fell for fake job offers and ended up as modern-day slaves. A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU Friday, 8.30 am Asean Business Business insights centering on South-east Asia's fast-growing economies. Sign Up Sign Up They often work from fenced compounds and barred-up rooms under the threat of torture, compelled to fleece unsuspecting targets until they find a victim anywhere in the world. One Vietnamese man escaped from a centre in the Philippines by climbing a wall, crossing a river and eventually seeking shelter at a farm. Police found electrocution scars on him. On the other side are the marks. Lulled into a false sense of trust over digital communications with people they never see, they fall prey to cyberfraud or romance scams designed to persuade them to move savings into fraudulent schemes. Fake crypto assets are common. Others are 'pig butchered' – fattened up for slaughter – in a euphemism for an investment scam where fraudsters gain their confidence over time, and persuade them into investing away their fortunes. That is what happened to Erika DeMask, a widow from Illinois, who thought she had finally found love again, only to lose her life savings – almost a million dollars – over a period of several months. Her online boyfriend told her he loved her, even once sending her a bouquet of flowers. At first, the requests for money came slowly – but soon grew to tens of thousands of dollars. DeMask faced financial ruin, forced to sell her family home. Shutting scam factories is like playing whack-a-mole – dismantle one and another pops up. Asean has tried to coordinate efforts before, but with minimal success. Its traditional policy of non-interference in the affairs of member states clashes with the need to address these scam farms, Asha Hemrajani, senior fellow at the Singapore-based S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told me. 'Many of the victims are Americans or Chinese,' she said. 'So it would make sense for the two superpowers to work together to stamp out this scourge.' US citizens are among the top global targets, with an estimated US$5 billion lost to online scams in 2024 alone – a 42 per cent increase over the previous year, notes a new report by a commission created by the US Congress that reviews economic and security relations with China. Across South-east Asia, hotels, casinos and private compounds that were left abandoned after the pandemic have been transformed into scam farms, run by mainly Chinese criminal networks. The report alleged that the shadowy organisations behind them have unspecified ties to the Chinese government, expanding across the region with, at a minimum, tacit approval from elements of the Communist Party. Beijing denies explicit involvement, while insisting that it is fully committed to tackling the problem. In a statement in January, the Ministry of Public Security said that it 'will continue to maintain a high-pressure crackdown on cross-border telecommunications network fraud crimes'; increase international cooperation; 'make every effort to destroy overseas... fraud dens; arrest the 'financial sponsors' and backbones of criminal groups'; and free trapped people. The government does intervene when it believes the damage to national interests has reached boiling point. Typically, this is when criminal syndicates hurt Chinese citizens overseas – as was the case in a high-profile disappearance of actor Wang Xing in a town in Thailand bordering Myanmar earlier this year. He was later rescued by Thai police from a scam centre where he had been lured by human traffickers. China has urged people to beware of fake overseas job offers that could lead to human trafficking for scam-farm employment. The Hong Kong government has issued a similar warning. For its part, the US could train South-east Asian police to combat cyber and cryptocurrency crimes carried out by transnational syndicates, using experience gained from fighting against narcotics organisations in Latin America. Providing human-rights training to assist in protecting trafficked victims would help. China has more leverage. Its relationships with Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos position it to crack down on scam hubs far more effectively. There is precedent – Beijing has worked with both the Myanmar military and anti-junta rebels against crime networks. Joint law enforcement cooperation with the US could amplify those efforts. Washington and Beijing may be locked in a bitter trade war, but they have put that aside in the past to combat flows of fentanyl into the US. Finding common ground against scammers stealing from grandmothers should not be such a stretch. BLOOMBERG
Business Times
a day ago
- Business Times
UBS Pays US$300 Million to settle Credit Suisse mortgage case
[ZURICH] UBS Group said it reached an agreement with the US Department of Justice to resolve a legacy Credit Suisse matter related to the former bank's role in selling residential mortgage-backed securities in the US. An agreement between the DOJ and a Credit Suisse subsidiary had been reached 'to resolve all outstanding Consumer Relief Obligations under the 2017 settlement by paying US$300 million,' UBS said in a statement on Monday (Aug 4). UBS is working through a list of legacy legal issues inherited from Credit Suisse, which it bought in an emergency rescue in 2023. In May, UBS agreed to pay US$511 million to settle a US investigation into how Credit Suisse Group helped rich Americans evade taxes. A number of lenders had faced claims over the sale of mortgage securities that plummeted in value during the 2008 financial crisis. The banks faced allegations that they misrepresented the quality of the home loans underpinning these securities in order to win buyers, exacerbating the impact of the sub-prime mortgage collapse. In 2023, UBS agreed to pay US$1.44 billion to settle its own long-running case over US mortgage-backed securities, which was one of the bank's biggest legal headaches at the time. UBS said that as a result of Monday's announcement it expects to recognise a credit in its third quarter earnings in the bank's non-core unit as a result of the release of the contingent liability. BLOOMBERG