The multibillion-dollar losses incurred by UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group over the past year have pointed up their vulnerability to the same afflictions faced by other major international banks. But the 328 other Swiss banks specializing in the nation's famed wealth management and other cautious approaches to investing appear relatively unfazed.

"If you look around Europe at the moment everybody's got their steel helmets on as the scaffolding's crumbling down, and we've seen no indications that there's a banking crisis in Switzerland," said James Nason, spokesman for the Swiss Bankers Association.

Nason conceded that "everybody is suffering today because of poor market conditions," but he said Swiss banks have a "huge pool of deposits to call on" and need to borrow less from other international banks.

Saving has deep roots in Switzerland.

"The Swiss are generally a risk-averse people. Maybe that goes back to times when they were primarily an agricultural people and crop failure meant not just financial ruin but also starvation," Nason said. "I think risk management is in their genes."

In 2005, the most recent comparable year available, Switzerland's gross national savings was 36.1 percent of GDP, compared with 13.5 percent for the United States.

Not only are the Swiss good savers themselves, but many wealthy people around the world look to Switzerland as a place to stash their assets.

The banks together manage some 5.2 trillion Swiss francs (US$4.2 trillion) in securities holdings for their clients, both foreign and domestic.

Manuel Ammann, a finance professor at the prestigious University of St. Gallen in eastern Switzerland, said wealth management has traditionally been very strong in Switzerland.

Swiss banks - including the large ones - put emphasis on having a strong capital base to send a signal of security to their customers, he said.

"That makes for a fairly large deposit base in Switzerland and that makes banks more resilient to the developments that we've seen in the last few weeks," Ammann told The Associated Press.

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