Credit Suisse
Credit Suisse Archegos Capital Losses
Estimated impact: $5.5B
Credit Suisse lost $5.5 billion when family office Archegos Capital defaulted on margin calls from highly leveraged total return swap positions. Despite receiving multiple internal warnings about Archegos's concentrated exposure, the prime brokerage division chose to maintain the profitable relationship rather than reduce limits.
Decision context
Whether to enforce margin requirements and reduce exposure to Archegos Capital as the family office's concentrated leveraged positions grew beyond normal risk thresholds.
Biases present in the decision
Toxic combinations
- Status Quo Lock
Reference class base rates
Across all 146 curated case studies in our library:
Lessons learned
- Revenue anchoring causes relationship managers to underweight risk signals when a client is highly profitable.
- Status quo bias in risk management means limits that should be tightened remain unchanged until it is too late.
- When multiple banks have the same exposure, the first to act minimizes losses while the last absorbs the worst.
Source: Credit Suisse Special Committee Report on Archegos (2021); SEC complaint against Archegos principals (Case Study)
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