"We will see more bank runs" - with Ronnie Grob
Mar 22, 2023
This weekly podcast about Bitcoin is the initiative of the Viennese financial journalist Niko Jilch. The goal: to strengthen and network the German-speaking Bitcoin community - and to bring the Bitcoin phenomenon closer to as broad a mass as possible.
We accompany this project as one of the main sponsors in this blog and also make all podcast episodes available here as a video.
"Something has happened again," is the only way Niko can put it. First the SVB in the USA and now Credit Suisse in Switzerland. During the last two weekends, Credit Suisse was almost "rescued" twice. First with money through credit lines from the Swiss central bank, and then with the takeover by UBS for CHF 3 billion. A shock for Switzerland as a banking center - and for the liberal soul of the Swiss, says Niko.
In this episode, he talks to the editor-in-chief of "Schweizer Monat": Ronnie Grob.
Was everything okay at Credit Suisse? "It's hard to judge from the outside, the equity ratio seems to have been okay, but the trust of the customers was suddenly gone," explains Ronnie.
"Switzerland once had two major banks. And there was already talk of a very high cluster risk. Now it suddenly has only one big bank. What about the risk now? In any case, the state has taken over," says the journalist.
And he immediately adds a general criticism: "The state often believes it is omnipotent and can solve everything. And governments seem to have acquired a taste for governing by emergency decree at Corona." Indeed, Credit Suisse's shareholders were simply wiped out in a very short time by a change in the law, justified by emergency law. Here, the Swiss government could still be threatened with some lawsuits by overreaching shareholders, says Ronnie.
"This is exactly what Bitcoin was invented for: against bank runs," Ronnie notes! Yes, that's exactly the message Satoshi left us in Bitcoin's genesis block. What Ronnie also considers remarkable is the recent decoupling of the Bitcoin price from the stock market. He believes this trend will continue to accentuate. And that's a good thing!
Ronnie does not believe that the crisis is already over: "We will see more bank runs internationally." He also has a suggestion for Switzerland: "Bitcoin is neutral. Just like Switzerland. That would go well together."
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