another big casualty - UBS

--UBS will take $10 billion write-down and sell a chunk of itself (11.5 bil) to the government investment arm of Singapore and an unnamed Middle Eastern investor --CDO (super senior exposure) at the end of Q3 is around 20 bil --UBS, which had already taken a $4.4 billion third-quarter write-down --UBS joins a growing list of Western banks, including Bear Stearns Cos., Barclays PLC, and HSBC Holdings PLC, that have received capital injections from Asia and the Middle East this year --Zurich-based UBS, formed from the 1998 merger of SBC Corp. and Union Bank of Switzerland, has struggled with its identity in recent years. It pushed aggressively into investment banking, but at times its investment bankers chafed at the Swiss bankers' historically conservative culture. It reached a boiling point earlier this year when several high-level investment bankers left. --UBS's holdings tied to subprime mortgages eroded its core "tier 1" capital to about 10.6% at the end of September, and came close to falling below a UBS internal target of keeping capital in double-digit figures. Traditionally, the bank has tried to maintain a high level of capital relative to peers because some of its core wealth-management clients tend to be sensitive about its financial health, the bank said. The capital-raising measures announced yesterday will raise the bank's tier 1 capital to 12%, the company said in a statement.