There is stiff competition for the title of the world's worst bank but the Swiss shambles, UBS, must now have pushed aside the financial catastrophes that are Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS and CitiBank, to sit atop the whole stinking heap.
If guilty, 'rogue trader' Kweku Adoboli, a UBS investment bank trader remains in police custody amid allegations that he cost the Swiss bank £1.2bn, is yet another stark reminder that the incompetent money bulimics that still dominate the world banking systems are not fit for purpose.
Indeed it is all so depressingly familiar. So we hear that Adoboli was a "star" of the trading floor working in "complex financial instruments" but - and here's a laugh - the so-called exchange traded funds he dealt in were supposedly "risk free."
That UBS exists at all is a testament to the 'Socialism for the rich' that now passes for economic policy in the West. Of all the mammoth losses sustained by the banks after 2008 UBS were the most monumental. These 'gnomes of Zurich,' whose stupidity was even greater than their bloated bonuses, bet the whole cuckoo clock factory on sub-prime junk reaping a whooping $50bn loss since 2007. But in the Kafkaesque world of too big to fail banks profits are privatised but losses are socialised; UBS was bailed out by the Swiss taxpayer.
If being greedy and incompetent is standard fare in world banking then UBS managed to out-do its notorious peer group when it faced criminal accusations of helping wealthy Americans evade taxes on a massive scale. U.S clients held about 19,000 secret accounts at UBS, with an estimated $20 billion in assets, in Switzerland, according to the findings.
In 2009, UBS had to pay a fine of $780 million to the US Government and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement on charges of conspiring to defraud the United States by impeding the Internal Revenue Service. One top UBS manager is still a fugitive from justice.
This lamentable record did not stop UBS chief executive Oswald Grübel from lecturing the British government in March about daring to consider tougher regulation and hinting at the predictable blackmail of moving the banks business out of London. Embarrassingly, it would now appear that Herr Grübel's own trading floor was not even capable of regulating itself.
The fact that three years after the credit crunch, that tipped Europe and the USA into an economic crisis that has no end in sight, another episode of money madness can hit a supposedly top investment bank is an indictment of a system - guaranteed by the humble taxpayer who now faces job cuts, a reduced standard of living and cuts in services as repayment for his generosity - that only exists to serve the greed-addled bankers themselves.
The irony is that the UBS 'rogue trader' was uncovered in the same week that the Vickers Report on banking reform was published. His recommendation to split investment (or casino) banking from retail would have been dramatic had it not been for the sucker-punch - implementation delayed until 2019. For pity's sake, it took less than six to defeat Nazism why does it take eight to restructure organisations that are supposed to employ, so we are repeatedly told, the world's top (certainly the most richly rewarded) managerial talent?
Moreover, only hours after Adoboli's arrest it was reported that the world's central banks are to flood the European markets with dollars in a "big show of support for the global banking system." The Greek people must endure years of extreme austerity and economic hopelessness but the banks must be saved is the message.
Short of a popular rising, feeding the dangerous, feral elite is the price we must pay for having allowed them to bamboozle us (and our political masters) into the get-rich-quick scheme once called finance capitalism model but now revealed to be a vast global doomsday machine.