Do you expect there to be further consolidation in the world banking industry?

Simon Meadows is known for striking terror into CSFB traders at the bank's Canary Wharf headquarters in London. But this particular Friday morning he is relaxed, smiling and talkative. Perhaps it's because he is about to go scuba diving in Grenada. Or perhaps it's because he can look back on a good year, having added Russia, Lebanon, Turkey, Slovenia, Croatia and Romania to his list of sovereign clients.

Did Nikolaus Senn, chairman of the embattled Union Bank of Switzerland, seize a merger proposal from CS chairman Rainer Gut and use it as a crude weapon against his bitterest enemy and major shareholder Martin Ebner? Here's the story whose climax a third of all Zurich inhabitants watched on television. But will it have a happy ending? And who pairs off with whom? David Shirreff reports

There could scarcely be a greater contrast: in the financial heart of Zurich, in restrained classical grandeur, Credit Suisse and Union Bank of Switzerland make the Bahnhofstrasse neighbourhood still more stately--and in obscure back streets lurk their foreign competitors.

It was like the meeting of two big and powerful families, the Medici and the Strozzi in Florence, or the Gambinos and the Bonannos in New York. But this was April 22, 1986.