This article asked how the documents of March 2023 set the guarantee and the loan, and how the sums they announced differed from the sums that could be used. In the United States the FDIC's release of 10 March protected insured depositors by a named Monday, offered the uninsured an advance dividend, a certificate and a possibility of further payment, and gave the bank's size but not the size of the uninsured claims, which it said was undetermined. The joint statement of 12 March protected all depositors from the same Monday, named shareholders, certain unsecured debtholders and senior management as unprotected and banks as the payers of any losses to the fund, announced additional funding for eligible institutions, and gave no sum and no end. In Switzerland the emergency ordinance of 16 March set out three kinds of liquidity loan, each opened only when the one before is exhausted and the last backed by a federal guarantee, named no sum for any of them, named the borrower and its owners and managers as payers and constrained parties, and stated a term of six months. The amendment of 19 March set aside shareholders' votes for a merger between such banks, let FINMA order additional core capital written off, and added a loss guarantee of at most 9 billion francs, payable only after the acquiring bank had borne 5 billion.
The contribution is to set deposit protection and central bank lending side by side on the record. The comparison shows that the guarantee was written as an outcome and the loan as a procedure; that neither form put a usable sum in its legal text; and that the primary texts, unlike the modern summaries of them, name who would pay. To the debate over what stops a run it adds the wording of both instruments within a single month. To the debate over rules set in advance it adds a contrast between an emergency act that states its basis, its conditions and its term and one that states its aim and its bearers and leaves its basis and its end unwritten.
The limits are plain. Four texts and two records are a small base. Two primary texts that matter, the Swiss National Bank's and the Swiss government's press releases of 19 March, were not available, and the record's figures rest on the first of them alone. The Swiss texts are advance prints read in this study's English. The records are modern summaries read in translation, and the ledger reads only them. No claim is made about whether any act was right, legitimate or effective, or about what followed.
Further research could go in three directions. The first is the missing texts: the Swiss National Bank's release and the Federal Council's own statement of 19 March, and the Board's announcement of additional funding referred to in the joint statement, which would show where the sums were written and in what words. The second is the binding versions of the Swiss ordinance and its amendment in the Official Compilation, and any later act that extended, replaced or ended the ordinance, which would test its six-month term against what followed. The third is the other cases in the parent study's ledger in which a guarantee or a loan was announced, to ask whether the pattern found here, bearers named in the act and dropped in the summary, recurs.
Appendix: Ledger Figures Used
All figures are from the numbers file of the parent study (content/books/skeptron-crises/numbers.md), in the ledger's own terms. The ledger reads Skeptron's records, not the primary texts. Its codings are one model run twice; a cell is settled where both codings give the same value and unsettled where they differ. The study's own fields were registered with hypotheses F1 to F5 on 2026-10-06T09:55Z, before coding.
The ledger holds 84 cases; 24 are read closely. Silicon Valley Bank belongs to the group Skeptron's crisis history (16 cases) and The Credit Suisse Takeover to Skeptron's credit history (29 cases).
Case-by-case cells for the two cases read here:
| Case | act | act kind | temporary | exit named | outcome of term | dates apart | figure | bearer named |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Silicon Valley Bank | yes | suspension-or-closure | not-said | not-named | not-said | not-named | no-figure | not-named |
| The Credit Suisse Takeover | yes | lending-guarantee-or-rescue | not-said | not-named | not-said | not-named | announced-and-available-apart | unsettled |
Among the 24 cases read closely: temporary, term-stated 3; figure, no-figure 17, announced-and-available-apart 3; bearer named, not-named 17, unsettled 5, named 1.
Across all 84 cases, lenient readings:
- F4 (in most cases that give a figure, the case's own text sets the figure announced apart from what was available, drawn, paid or settled later): against (supports 7, against 31, unclear 16, not applicable 30; share 18%).
- F5 (in most cases that show an act, the case's own text does not name who bore the loss or the cost while the act was in force or not yet taken): supports (supports 35, against 3, unclear 6, not applicable 40; share 92%).
F4 by group, lenient: Skeptron's crisis history, against (1 for, 2 against, 2 unclear; 33%); Skeptron's credit history, unclear (5 for, 5 against, 4 unclear; 50%).
Cases whose record lets a later reader judge an emergency act by its own end (an act presented as temporary; an observable condition of its end named; who bore its cost named; two dated moments named): 1 of 42 (2%); neither of the two cases read here is that one.