Swiss bank Credit Suisse will not withdraw from investment banking despite the losses caused by the credit crisis, the bank's chairman said in an interview published on Saturday.
In the interview with the newspaper Basler Zeitung, Credit Suisse chairman Walter Kielholz also warned that tough new regulations in Switzerland for the two big banks might endanger their competitiveness and turn them into take-over candidates.
"The economic outlook for the coming three to five years and the expected investment risks for this time certainly suggest that we will take a conservative approach when providing our investment bank with capital," Kielholz said according to an online version of the newspaper.
Calls for the bank to focus on private banking alone were wrong as private banking clients wanted a broad range of services, Kielholz said. "That includes the investment bank."
Credit Suisse has so far written down some $9 billion in credit-related assets, far less than its Swiss-based rival UBS, Europe's hardest-hit victim of the credit crisis which has a similar business model. Kielholz criticised plans from Swiss regulators to impose stricter requirements on the two major Swiss banks.
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