John D. Rockefeller used to say that the way to make money is “to buy when blood is running in the streets”. But has enough blood been spilled in the US subprime crisis to justify the heady investments being made by the world’s sovereign wealth funds in US and European banking institutions?

Clearly no, judging by the seemingly endless flow of bad news. Tuesday, it was the turn of Credit Suisse to shock the market by revealing $2.85bn of losses on structured credit positions partly caused by pricing errors by some of its traders. It was all the more shocking given that the Swiss bank was thought to have weathered the current crisis better than most – and certainly far better than its Swiss rival UBS. Coming so soon after it reported relatively robust results and coming so soon after the rogue trading scandal at Société Générale, the shock disclosure raises some obvious questions. Was the Credit Suisse discovery prompted by a closer look at controls in the light of what has happened at SocGen? And if so, is there more bad news to come from other banks as they conduct similar internal inquiries?