🧩 Proton vs. Goliath

While you were calmly scrolling through Instagram this morning, very serious civil servants — in very grey suits, sitting in very beige offices — were busy drafting yet another report on how to “rein in” Big Tech. Eighteen months of delay for the Swiss proposal, thousands of pages on the EU side, and in the meantime Elon Musk launches Groikipedia to blow up Wikipedia between two tweets about aliens. Regulation is a wonderful thing: it keeps people busy, produces impressive PowerPoint decks, and gives the comforting illusion of control. Meanwhile, Facebook keeps collecting its billions by selling us ads for mood-changing socks.

The real issue is the elephant everyone pretends not to see. We churn out texts on data protection, invent theoretical fines, create oversight committees to oversee other oversight committees — but no one dares state the obvious: the business model of these platforms is to turn users into dopamine-fuelled hamsters, frantically clicking on whatever flashes. The more polarising, the more profitable. The dumber, the more viral. The algorithm doesn’t care whether you’re arguing about geopolitics or the correct cheese ratio in fondue — as long as you stay glued to the screen.

Meanwhile, a few stubborn Genevans quietly prove that digital services don’t have to turn users into products. Proton. Infomaniak. Companies built around service, not behavioural manipulation. CERN gave the web to the world for free, no strings attached — apparently too simple an idea. Instead, we turned it into an advertising cash machine where every click helps finance a billionaire’s bunker in New Zealand.

The solution isn’t complicated. It’s just uncomfortable. Stop pretending. Stop believing that you can meaningfully regulate companies whose revenues exceed the GDP of entire countries with rules they’ve already learned to circumvent before the vote is even scheduled. If change is the goal, you don’t need more committees — you need viable alternatives. But building alternatives requires political courage and imagination. Writing yet another report that ends up in a drawer is, admittedly, much easier.

Have a great week,

M. Hantale 🧀

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🗞️ Top Stories

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🇨🇭 Switzerland

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• 🇹🇼 Defense. Taiwan will raise its military budget by 34.5 billion euros to prepare for a potential Chinese invasion by 2027.

• 🇨🇭 Banking.Swiss lawmakers are proposing to ease capital requirements for UBS, pushing the stock to its highest level in 17 years.
• 🇨🇭 Elder care. Emeis is selling its Swiss nursing homes and senior residences to Tertianum and two investors for 270 million euros, covering 40 facilities and 3,600 beds.
• 🇺🇸 Agri-food. Läderach is refusing to manufacture in the United States despite tariffs, arguing that customers demand chocolate that is 100 percent Swiss-made.
• 🏭 Oil. Despite stable demand, OPEC is forecasting an increase in global supply, driven mainly by non-member producers.
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Stocks

Currency

Switzerland and Its Banking Monster: When Pragmatism Collides with Pride

Karin Keller-Sutter, the current rotating president of the Swiss Confederation, perfectly embodies a very Swiss paradox: wanting the butter, the money from the butter, and the neutrality of the dairymaid. Described by the local press as an “unyielding, power-hungry personality” — a rare compliment in a country that usually celebrates the discreet elegance of a well-balanced fondue — she has entered into a standoff with UBS that could prove costly for Zurich’s financial hub. After orchestrating the forced rescue of Credit Suisse in 2023, she now wants to impose capital requirements on the surviving bank worthy of a medieval chastity belt: a 19 percent ratio, while international peers get by comfortably with around 11.6 percent.

The timing, one must admit, is exquisite. As Donald Trump prepares a wave of bank deregulation that would make the Reagan years look like an era of monastic caution, Switzerland is moving in the opposite direction, determined to turn UBS into a walking vault. U.S. and British bank stocks are up 25 to 70 percent over the past year, while UBS limps along at around plus 10 percent — like a forgotten piece of Gruyère left too long in a damp cellar. The bank has hinted at relocating activities to the United States, where a Trump administration would reportedly roll out the red carpet — probably gold-plated, given the man’s tastes. Zurich observers consider such a move unlikely, but it has still set a few teeth grinding along Bahnhofstrasse.

Keller-Sutter, it must be said, appears to have developed a particular talent for Swiss-style negotiation — which is to say, the exact opposite of what the world usually expects from the Helvetic consensus machine. Her summer meeting with Trump over the trade deficit ended with higher tariffs, a rare diplomatic achievement. One Swiss business leader quipped that a gold Rolex would likely have done the trick. Instead, the minister chose confrontation — and got the opposite result. Swiss companies later had to clean up the mess themselves, eventually bringing tariffs down from 39 percent to 15 percent. One can easily picture the scene: Swiss industrialists arriving with watches and chocolate, mopping up diplomatic damage the way one wipes spilled Fendant off an embroidered tablecloth.

At heart, this is the classic dilemma of any country hosting a bank whose balance sheet exceeds half of national GDP: how do you tame the monster without killing it? UBS is undeniably a potential liability for Swiss taxpayers — a fair concern given the 2008 bailout and the long list of scandals that followed, from Libor manipulation to tax evasion. But it is also 35,000 domestic jobs, an entire financial ecosystem, and, effectively, the chief financier of the Swiss economy. Unsurprisingly, the Federal Council’s economic affairs committee has now pushed back, reminding Keller-Sutter that it would be “crucial” for new rules not to exceed those of competing financial centres. Translation: stop sawing off the branch we’re sitting on.

France resolved this dilemma long ago by periodically nationalising its banking problems, then handing them back to the private sector once the storm has passed — a bit like parents who take back the abandoned dog during the holidays only to give it away again at Christmas. Switzerland prefers preventive strangulation: tightening the garrot so hard the patient considers self-amputation. It’s hard to say which approach works better, but at least the Swiss are consistent in their regulatory paranoia.

The irony is that UBS could probably calm things down with a few symbolic gestures: a pledge to protect jobs here, a pause on Sergio Ermotti’s eyebrow-raising pay rises there, perhaps even a contribution to compensating holders of Credit Suisse’s wiped-out AT1 bonds. But in this game of poker between a “power-hungry” minister and a banker with stratospheric compensation, Switzerland’s legendary pragmatism seems to be on extended holiday. Meanwhile, Wall Street watches the alpine quarrel with amusement — already preparing the welcome mat for a hypothetical American UBS. Proof that even in Switzerland, land of permanent consensus, a single strong personality can turn negotiation into trench warfare. The French, for their part, would already have organised three strikes and a referendum.

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