Thread by @marguerite_jay

THREAD:
Switzerland is a strange country. On the surface it is a polished Disneyland. “Swissneyland”, a friend of mine likes to call it. At a closer look, it is the well-oiled PR machine of a corporation. This is a thread between a rant & trying to grasp the #CreditSuisse issue.

15y ago I was a journo newbie at a fin news agency in Zurich. My colleagues & I watched the shares of another bank plummet by the second – the UBS, the too-big-to-fail, the bailout, where the state saved a private company in order to save the economy. swissinfo.ch/eng/business/2…

Once again we have a bailout, but this time we don't call it this. It looks like a private takeover of CS by UBS, but with a deficit guarantee by state structures. It also creates a new monster at the heart of the Swiss banking system.

As someone grown up in Switzerland, there have been several moments in time where I am reminded again and again just how neoliberal our country is to the core. The free market is the all-above motto. However, despite the privatisation of gains, risks are too often collectivised.

In general, we love fake free markets. Common goods are given into the hands of private or semi-private structures. So it all looks pretty free-markety. But when they can no longer make this work, the state discreetly helps out. Let's take a look at our health insurance system...

20% of Swiss cannot afford the monthly contributions set by the private companies. So instead of regulating the insurance companies more or – behold, have a public health system – the state subsidises these 20%, indirectly feeding a private structure with tax payer money.

This way, the state allows common goods to be kind of accessible, but without the private economy losing face – from the outside, everything still looks like a free market, right? Neoliberal ideology remains untouched.

Neoliberalism is king in a country that so cherishes its democratic values. Read more about the Swiss birthplace of neoliberalism on Mont Pèlerin here: republik.ch/2021/10/23/auf…

Switzerland is a country where you can make a shitload of money if you’ve already got a lot, and in many jobs you can earn a decent wage. Infrastructure is high and well-kept and I’m not going to lie: This makes a lot of everyday life easier.

But it is also a country where the poor are considered poor due to their own fault, a quarter of the country has no voting rights and assets of oligarchs find a nice little home. I will not get into the latter now, but it is imho part of the same story.

Throwback to the middle of the pandemic: "I regret every spent franc", the former finance minister said with regard to saving small businesses and jobs. At the same moment, thousands of small business owners, artists, care workers were watching.

Yesterday’s presser, where the government announced the fast-track buyout of CS by UBS & governmental guarantees given, was an absurd show. Not a word of addressing responsibilities for the failure of this bank whose managers have been cashing insane bonuses for years.

The failure of a system-relevant bank that has 10'000s employees, is crucial for the local economy, that has many Swiss pensions wrapped up in it, is presented as an Act of God, like a weather storm or an avalanche that could not be predicted, just happened out of the blue.

Nobody seems responsible, and even if so, there will be no consequences. Oh, clients & investors just kinda lost their trust, all because of some rumours on Social Media, nothing to see here, let’s look into the glorious future instead of dwelling on what went wrong.

One of the Freudian slips at yesterday’s press conference was: “too big to feel” instead of “too big to fail”. Quite fitting – watching on makes me feel numb.

Nothing to see here, this is just Switzerland Inc.