🇨🇭 Switzerland Will Host Your War
The United States and Iran spent the year at war. Now they're at a Swiss mountain resort, trying to salvage a ceasefire neither side trusts. The resort has seen this before.
The Bürgenstock is a luxury resort on a mountain above Lake Lucerne, and it has quietly become the place world powers go to fail at peace. Two years ago it hosted more than 90 countries and 57 heads of state for a Ukraine summit, secured by 4,000 police, that produced a communiqué and, as far as anyone can tell, nothing else. The resort sits at the top of a single mountain road, which is half the point: you can seal it off in an afternoon and keep the cameras at a respectful distance. This week it gets the United States and Iran, there to salvage a ceasefire Tehran already says Washington has broken, with missiles still landing in Lebanon and Iran threatening to choke the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil. The airspace is closed, the rooms are booked, and the booking, as ever, will be flawless. The outcome is somebody else’s problem.
Washington and Tehran have had no diplomatic relations since 1979. Someone has to stand in the middle, and it is always Bern, which holds the « protecting power » mandate for American interests in Iran. Switzerland minded the interests of 35 warring states at once in the Second World War, and never really stopped. When Washington wants to tell Tehran something, it tells the Swiss, and the Swiss tell Tehran. For 46 years there has been a real diplomat in a real office in Tehran whose entire job is to be America’s answering machine, an arrangement a few in the Swiss parliament now call quiet appeasement of a regime that shoots its own people.
The Swiss, by the way, are so allergic to the strongman that they took the faces off their money. The current banknotes carry no statesmen, no founding heroes, just abstract themes: Time, Light, Water, Matter. A country that governs itself by referendum, swaps its president every year without bothering to make you learn the name, and pushes every decision it can down to the cantons, its 26 statelets, looked at the global market for providential figures and decided it would rather print a picture of a hand. While Washington tears itself apart over which man will save it, the Swiss arranged not to need one.
And the same neutrality cashes out at the bank. Every time someone threatens to close a strait or level a city, the money runs to the place that does neither: the franc rose 14% against the dollar in 2025 and sits at an 11-year high against the dollar and the euro. Switzerland posts a current-account surplus of CHF61.7B, manages roughly 25% of the world’s cross-border private wealth, and refines 70% of the world’s gold. So when two governments that loathe each other need somewhere safe to sit down, they skip Brussels, they skip Washington, and they book a room at the resort that has watched every other peace deal fail.
M. Hantale 🧀
- 🇨🇭 Diplomacy. Direct negotiations between the United States and Iran have just opened in Switzerland with the presence of US Vice-President JD Vance and an Iranian delegation, despite Tehran’s announcement of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
- 🇨🇭 Politics. An initial poll indicates that Swiss voters should reject a tightening of neutrality in the vote scheduled for autumn, maintaining the current framework.
- 🇮🇱 Diplomacy. Israeli minister Gideon Saar breaks « all contact » with EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas following remarks attributed to her comparing it to apartheid, and demands their withdrawal.
- 🇨🇭 Diplomacy. Swiss President Guy Parmelin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met in Geneva to discuss Switzerland’s role as a good offices mediator in the conflict, Ukraine’s reconstruction and a free trade agreement.
- 🇨🇭 Defence. The Swiss Parliament adopts a motion calling on the government to open negotiations with the EU for a security and defence agreement, formally excluding NATO.
Economy & Finance
- 🇪🇺 Inflation. Eurozone inflation confirmed at 3.2% in May on a year-on-year basis, after 3.0% in April, with monthly prices rising by 0.1% in May.
- 🇨🇭 Growth. After a year at the top, Switzerland slips to 3rd position in the IMD rankings, penalised by weaker economic performance linked to a decline in investment, whilst Singapore regains 1st place.
- 🇫🇷 Growth. The Banque de France has sharply downgraded its 2026 forecast to 0.5%, down 0.4 percentage points from March, following a negative surprise in Q1 (-0.1 percentage points) linked to a collapse in exports (-3.5%).
- 🇪🇺 Growth. The IMF has downgraded its growth forecast for the eurozone in 2026, pointing to inflation reinforced by the war in the Middle East and rising energy prices that will slow economic activity.
- 🇬🇧 Growth. Brexit has reduced the size of the British economy by approximately 6% since the 2016 referendum, according to a Bank of England study based on its Decision Maker Panel.
- 🇨🇭 Employment. Job offers related to AI in Switzerland reached a record 25,000 in 2025, up 9,000 year-on-year, but still represent only 1.8% of advertisements.
- 🇩🇪 Employment. Germany’s industrial workforce has fallen to 6.6M, a ten-year low, with industry’s share declining from 22% in 2014 to 19% today, as companies hesitate to fill vacant positions.
- 🇨🇭 Trade. The Swiss Chamber rejects the EFTA–Mercosur free trade agreement by 96 votes to 86 with 9 abstentions, referring the text to the Council of States for a second reading.
- 🇪🇺 Trade. The European Parliament has approved the bulk of the trade agreement with the United States: customs duties reduced to 0% on US industrial goods (car parts, machinery) and lobster, whilst certain European products will remain taxed at around 15%.
- 🇨🇭 Rates. The SNB is maintaining its main policy rate at 0%, the lowest amongst major central banks, despite a recent rise in inflation linked to fuel.
- 🇪🇺 Rates. The ECB could raise its rates as early as July if inflation spreads beyond energy, warned Pierre Wunsch, who evokes the possibility of a further increase of 25 basis points should the inflationary momentum in services be confirmed (3.5% in May).
- 🇯🇵 Rates. The Bank of Japan raises its policy rate by 0.25 percentage points to 1%, its highest level in 31 years, to counter a rise in prices linked to the Middle East crisis.
- 🇨🇭 Taxation. Parliament approves a VAT increase of 0.4 percentage points from 2028 to finance the 13th pension, with the special hospitality rate rising by 0.2 percentage points, the expected effort in the first year being CHF4.2bn. The constitutional amendment will be put to a popular vote.
- 🇪🇺 Budget. The Twenty-Seven validate the architecture of the 2028-2034 budget but not the amounts, opening the door to new « own resources » to finance competitiveness and defence on a total close to €1,800bn.
Switzerland
- 🇨🇭 Politics. The motion aimed at banning the use of X by parliamentary services was rejected in the Chamber of Deputies, with the vote resulting in 119 in favour, 69 against and 11 abstentions.
- 🇨🇭 Defence. Several manufacturers promise to replace the delayed Patriots, claiming they can deliver anti-missile defence systems by 2028-29 whilst Switzerland would remain unprotected whilst awaiting a Patriot delivery potentially postponed until 2035.
- 🇨🇭 Healthcare. To combat shortages, the executive wants to facilitate the importation and local production of medicines and lift the general ban on mail-order sales, subject to cantonal authorisation.
- 🇨🇭 Immigration. The Senate wants to allow expulsions outside Europe by supporting readmission centres in third countries, motion adopted 27-10, 6 abstentions to ease the asylum system.
- 🇨🇭 Immigration. Parliament adopts a motion (26-11) banning the issuance of a residence permit to foreigners who have already been convicted, extending the practice of certain cantons to the entire country.
- 🇨🇭 Energy. Parliament approves the government’s counter-proposal to the « Stop the Blackout » initiative and adopts a legal amendment lifting the ban on building new nuclear power plants; voters will now decide on both texts.
- 🇨🇭 Energy. Final energy consumption in Switzerland increased slightly in 2025 by 0.2% to 777’870 TJ, partly due to a colder winter and a rise in aviation fuel sales.
- 🇨🇭 Climate. Level 3 and 4 heatwave alerts are expected to be extended beyond Tuesday, according to MeteoSwiss, following readings of around 30°C in Basel and 29.7°C in Zurich.
- 🇨🇭 Tourism. The Braunwald resort announces the cessation of skiing activities from the 2026/27 season onwards due to climate change and launches a process of tourism reinvention.
- 🇨🇭 Media. Parliament refers the copyright bill back to the government to include AI applications and require platforms, search engines and social networks to pay for the display of article excerpts.
- 🇨🇭 Science. Switzerland’s three heavyweights feature in the QS ranking’s top 100: ETH 8th (-1), EPFL 22nd and University of Zurich 98th (+2).
- 🇨🇭 Culture. A Picasso sold for $35M (27MCHF) at Hauser & Wirth during Art Basel, marking massive sales in the opening hours.
Elsewhere in the World
- 🇬🇧 Politics. King Charles III will publish his tax return as sovereign for the first time, a decision he expressly requested and which is due to be released in the coming days.
- 🇧🇴 Politics. After 50 days of blockades that have paralysed the economy and caused at least 14 deaths, President Rodrigo Paz Pereira has declared a state of emergency and ordered the armed forces to restore traffic flow and lift the roadblocks under « the full rigour of the law ».
- 🇨🇺 Politics. Cuba’s Parliament unanimously adopts 176 measures allowing large private enterprises, foreign participation and transformation of state-owned enterprises into joint-stock companies to exit the economic crisis.
- 🇬🇧 Elections. Andy Burnham, elected MP for Makerfield with 54.8% of the vote against 34.5% for Reform UK, can now gather support to trigger a no-confidence motion aimed at ousting Keir Starmer, which requires 20% of the parliamentary group, or 81 MPs.
- 🇨🇴 Elections. Abelardo de la Espriella, pro-Trump lawyer, wins the second round with 49.7% against 48.7% for Iván Cepeda and will take office on 7 August following a ballot that mobilised 41m voters.
- 🇪🇸 Justice. For the first time a former Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is appearing before a judge accused of influence peddling, tax fraud and money laundering, and may legally remain silent during his hearing.
- 🇧🇷 Justice. Jair Bolsonaro’s son has been sentenced to 4 years in prison and 8 years of ineligibility for having sought American measures against Brazil to protect his father.
- 🇨🇭 Rights. The Federal Department of the Interior announces the creation of an independent commission to investigate historical injustices suffered by Yenish and Sinti communities, with the mandate and legal framework to be defined without a specific timeframe.
- 🇨🇭 Defence. Switzerland will create a defence attaché in Warsaw mid-2027 to strengthen early threat detection in North-Eastern Europe and improve its military-diplomatic intelligence capacity.
- 🇫🇮 Defence. The Finnish Parliament has repealed the total ban on nuclear weapons, authorising the import, transit or storage of allied weapons on its soil to strengthen NATO deterrence, a measure voted 125-61.
- 🇲🇽 Security. The Mexican army shot down an unregistered drone flying over the South Korean national team’s training camp, two days before the Mexico–South Korea match in Guadalajara.
- 🇳🇪 Security. Heavy gunfire and explosions rang out for more than 1 hour on Thursday at Niamey airport and at a military base, with the area having been sealed off by security forces.
- 🇨🇳 Sanctions. Beijing places 10 American companies on a list prohibiting the export of dual-use items to these entities and orders the immediate halt of transfers from China.
- 🇨🇭 Transport. The AmiGo robotaxi, a joint venture between Baidu Apollo Go and PostBus, has obtained a special permit from the Federal Roads Office for Level 4 autonomous driving and is launching open road trials.
- 🇨🇭 Transport. Uber and WeRide plan to launch a commercial autonomous taxi service in Zurich this year via the Uber app, operated by Uber with the fleet under Rydera’s supervision, initially with an operator on board and then aiming for a fully driverless service.
- 🇨🇭 Technology. Swiss startup Prem AI raises $100M in Series A at a valuation of at least $500M, to enable hedge funds and law firms to harness AI on their own infrastructures.
SMI Index
| Name | Price | Mkt Cap | 7d Chg | YTD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roche | 323.00 | 256.98B | ▼ -2.4% | ▲ +0.1% |
| Novartis | 118.42 | 225.50B | ▼ -1.1% | ▲ +12.5% |
| Nestlé | 78.22 | 200.89B | ▼ -1.7% | ▲ +6.5% |
| ABB | 87.48 | 158.84B | ▲ +4.1% | ▲ +45.0% |
| UBS | 40.96 | 134.29B | ▲ +1.9% | ▲ +10.9% |
| Zurich Insurance | 577.20 | 86.16B | ▲ +0.1% | ▲ +1.6% |
| Holcim | 75.06 | 41.58B | ▼ -1.0% | ▼ -1.6% |
| Swiss Re | 123.25 | 36.28B | ▲ +0.6% | ▲ +0.8% |
| Lonza | 501.60 | 35.05B | ▲ +1.5% | ▼ -5.4% |
| Swisscom | 628.50 | 32.53B | ▼ -1.6% | ▲ +12.8% |
| Givaudan | 3,229.00 | 29.78B | ▲ +1.4% | ▲ +6.8% |
| Sika | 161.65 | 25.94B | ▲ +1.4% | ▲ +1.6% |
| Alcon | 52.56 | 25.62B | ▲ +0.1% | ▼ -16.9% |
| Swiss Life | 879.40 | 24.56B | ▲ +0.5% | ▼ -1.6% |
| SGS | 90.16 | 17.78B | ▲ +0.3% | ▲ +0.7% |
| Partners Group | 676.20 | 17.42B | ▼ -5.5% | ▼ -30.8% |
| Geberit | 517.40 | 17.07B | ▼ -0.6% | ▼ -14.0% |
| Straumann | 103.50 | 16.49B | ▲ +11.0% | ▲ +11.0% |
| Julius Bär | 65.78 | 13.50B | ▼ -0.4% | ▲ +4.4% |
| Logitech | 86.30 | 12.38B | ▼ -1.1% | ▲ +8.6% |
📅 Data as of 2026-06-22 11:51
Forex CHF
| Pair | Rate | 7d Chg | YTD |
|---|---|---|---|
| EUR/CHF | 0.93 | ▲ +0.45% | ▼ -0.60% |
| USD/CHF | 0.81 | ▲ +1.66% | ▲ +1.97% |
| GBP/CHF | 1.07 | ▲ +0.19% | ▲ +0.06% |
📅 Data as of 2026-06-22 11:51
The Prosecutor Switzerland Kept on Payroll
For sixty years, Jean Ziegler told the world that Switzerland was a laundromat for dictators, a vault for stolen gold, and a polite accomplice to every atrocity that needed financing. He died on June 10th, aged 92, having said all of it from inside a country that elected him to its federal parliament, paid his salary as a professor in Geneva, and put him on television whenever he asked. The man who called his homeland « the brain of the monster » lived inside the monster for 92 years, drawing a pension from it.
He earned the right to the accusation. As the UN special rapporteur on the right to food he spent years in Niger, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, where the hunger he wrote about was not a metaphor. The books cost him real money, libel suits that ran for years and that he mostly lost. He never softened and never cashed in. Whatever else he was, he was not a careerist.
He was also, often, right. The dormant accounts were real. The Nazi gold was real. The Bergier Commission, 11,000 pages for a budget of CHF22M, confirmed most of what he had been shouting about since the 1970s. UBS 🇨🇭, Credit Suisse 🇨🇭 and the central bank settled for $1.25B in 1998. Banking secrecy, the thing he attacked his whole life, is now functionally dead, dismantled by automatic exchange of information after 2017.
None of that came from the institutions waking up on their own. Bern does not audit its own banks for sport. It took fifty years of noise, his and others like him, to turn a national embarrassment into a parliamentary mandate. The reforms were Swiss in execution. The pressure that forced them was not, and much of it was his.
Born Hans Ziegler in Thun, son of a colonel and a district judge, he spent his life performing the anti-Swiss. Yet the performance was structurally local. A Protestant conservative upbringing turned inside out. A converted Catholic by the end, talking about eternal life on a programme called Helvetica, of all things. Burial at Saint-Pierre in Geneva, the cathedral of the Reformation. You could not invent a more Swiss death for the man who hated Swiss respectability.
Most countries cannot afford to let their fiercest critic speak for half a century. They exile him, buy him, or grind him into irrelevance. Switzerland did none of that. It kept him on the books, lost the lawsuits, read the verdict, and changed. A system strong enough to fund its own indictment, and slow enough to act on it only when shamed, needs a Ziegler to function. He never saw himself as its conscience. He saw injustice and named it, and would have rejected any credit for improving the place he attacked. The reforms arrived against Switzerland and through it at once. The country produced him, paid him, hated him, and proved him right. It never decided which. And that is the point.