A Good Slide

There is an expression this side of the roast-potato divide that invites New Year's revellers to have a good slide. I have never entirely understood it and given the current weather and the states of the streets in the city of Zurich the risk of some of us taking it literally rather than figuratively is significantly increased. I assume that it means that we should start the year well, by sliding into it, rather like one might slide along an ice skating rink, full of grace and style and poise.

Before I start to develop visions of myself as some kind of latter day Torvill and Dean, well Dean, as I can't be both Torvill and Dean, then I should note that I did start the new year with a slide. But it was more of a kind of skaty slide, a flailing, fumbling, falling slide as I ran for the number seven tram in morning. My ability to celebrate the New Year in a Swiss style obviously still requires a little practice. After eight years, I am still only a novice.

What I did do, however, was start a new activity. I have never really been one for new years resolutions since epiphany is about as far as I generally get with them. However this year I felt the time was right for me to take on something new, expand my horizons and generally lift myself out of the fur-lined rut.

Having become increasingly alarmed about stories of downhill skiers crashing into obstacles and into each other I decided that I would shun the conventional and take up a less dangerous sport. As options I ruled out horse riding, bungee jumping and sledding and settled instead on cross-country skiing.

There has apparently been an explosion of interest recently in cross country skiing brought on by those who in the course of nordic walking have found that they enjoy the movement of arm swinging and determined striding forward. For those of you unfamiliar with nordic walking, this when a walker uses ski poles to propel themselves along, giving them a sense of rhythm and purpose that is somehow missing in the traditional sport of simply going for a stroll. That you look faintly ridiculous seems by the by.

Cross country skiing uses the same principles. Long poles. Tight lycra. And two rather long skis strapped to you toes. The result is a feeling of schoocing rather skiing, sliding ones way through the countryside on little grooves dug into the snow. Things are fine on the flat – slog slog slog schooch schooch schooch – but uphill starts to get a little tricky. The answer is to either jog – apparently great for the gluts – or step out of the groove and do some nifty duck like herringbone walking. Actually come to think of it, this is presumably why Charlie Chaplin loved Vevey as he was close to the Cross Country courses where his splay footed walking style would come in useful when climbing hills on cross country skis.

All of this is all well and good, the problems arise when heading downhill. My usual downhill style of lean back and enjoy view unfortunately resulted in me coming clear of the grooves and sliding headfirst on my back down the side of a hill ending in a crumpled heap across both lanes of cross country traffic, like a lorry load of lycra and carbon fibre ski poles dumped across the autoroute. Everyone was very patient as I got back up and settled back into the groove. And no one can deny that I started 2009 with a slide.

Annus Horribilis

The British Queen once described her year as an annus horribilis – a rough one basically – after her castle burned down and her children proved for the first time that the British Royal family is in fact composed of human beings by getting divorced en masse.

If you were a Swiss banker you might be saying about the same thing around about now. Apart from a certain US based hedge fund manager, I can’t imagine many people who have had a worse year than some of the poor souls on the Bahnhofstrasse.

It has been a peculiar year in Zurich: confusing if you support the SVP, great if you a US democrat and probably quite expensive if you were the owner of any of the plethora of paintings that went missing from art galleries in a spate of art crime.

Just to give you a quick overview, I can recap you on some of the things that we have been through in Switzerland and some of the international events, just to keep it all in perspective. So in January, Toni Brunner became president of the SVP and, er, the US presidential campaign got into full swing.

In February, the French president married his glamourous French girlfriend and in March Medvedev became Russian president. In April, the Chinese Olympic torch caused outcry and an Austrian man was found to have kept half his family in a cellar for all their lives. In May, the SVP began to implode while in June the long awaited arrival of summer, well, never really happened. Spain won the European footall championships and in UK Roger Federer lost in Wimbledon. The Iphone took us be storm in July apparently, offering you the potential not only to talk while you walk but also listen to music, look at you tube clips, check your email and increase you likelihood of walking into a lamp post. I know, because I have done it.

The Swiss army began to show signs of battle fatigue in July after ti was revealed that its leader was a stalker. This followed the tragic deaths of several soldiers in a rafting accident and begged questions about precisely what a neutral nation like Switzerland was doing spending millions on an army that is effectively institutionally redundant… In August, the Swiss pick up a couple of gold medals at the Olympics and the US select Barack as their democratic nominee. In September, the particle accelerator at CERN was switched on and the US economy began to go into meltdown. There was apparently no linkage.

In October, Austria’s political firebrand was killed ina car crash, in November Barack was nominated, Samuel Schmid stands down, Merz recovers from a heart attack and Christoph Blocher considers going for a second run at the Bundesrat. In the end, it is Ueli Mauerer who makes it in, promising that Switzerland will get the best army possible – an excellent intention for a neutral country.

Throughout this all runs the thread of the global economy standing on a precipice, banks collapsing, bankers collapsing, the US economy collapsing and the particle accelerator being paused for some remedial action. An annus horribilis it may have been but hopefully we have avoided complete meltdown for another year.

Cold North Wind

The snow is already turning to slush but is it a sign of the long winter that is ahead of us? A recession. The prospect of job cuts. And a Christmas that could potentially be so parsimonious that it will make Scrooge seem like Santa Claus himself.

But it is not just the weather that has turned cold. Something in the political climate did the same thing.

For many years, Switzerland has had a somewhat complex relationship with its northern most neighbour: the big canton to the north – that would be Germany – has been a source of many things that have made Switzerland better (namely qualified company managers, fast cars, discount supermarkets and, allegedly, the large cash deposits). However, the Swiss seem generally ambivalent towards their teutonic cousins: in what was to my mind one of the most shocking examples of xenophobia that Zurich has seen recently, a German radio DJ was effectively hounded out of her job last year by a groundswell of opposition to her non-Swiss pronunciation.

Now, Germany’s purposefully uncharismatic finance minister Peer Steinbrueck has raised hackles with his suggestion that Switzerland be put on a blacklist of tax havens, with many arguing that this is a thinly disguised move to knock the stuffing out of Switzerland’s banking industry. It is an age-old battle and resurrecting it again is a sure fire way of testing the Swiss’s patience with their neighbours.

In Germany, such rhetoric – particularly from someone as bluntly spoken as Steinbrueck – is part of the rough and tumble of politics; a game that the media willingly plays along with until some other equally incendiary statement is made. But in Switzerland, where one’s word is taken at face value, such utterances normally carry far more weight and are seen as being a likely indicator of future policy. Perhaps they have a point: after all it was Steinbrueck who kicked off the massive tax evasion probe earlier this year that threatened to spill over from Liechtenstein into Switzerland.

The Swiss People’s Party, the nation’s most popular political grouping, appears to have seized this resentment, however, as the motivation for their latest policy position: their leader Toni Brunner surprised Switzerland earlier this week by saying that it will fight the continuation and extension of a labour treaty with the European Union under which most of Zurich’s German population, and me incidnetly, have got permits to work here.

Are the SVP redirecting the anger felt by voters over the attack on bank secrecy towards another target? Are they rising to Steinbrueck’s bait? Or are they positioning themselves for their next Swiss elections by drumming up some popular support.

A referendum on the free movement of people accord and extending it to Bulgaria and Romania will be held on February 8. Three of the four parties in the government, as well as the business lobby, are recommending they accept the deal.

It appears then that the move is an attempt to show that two can play at that game. It remains to be seen whether the vote will trigger another spate of icy temperatures and frosty weather from Switzerland’s northerly neighbour.

An Era's End

House prices and credit cards. Stock market investments and tracker funds. Manolo Blahniks and Cosmopolitans. In a couple of decades we will be looking back on the past eight years and wondering what got into us. How did a seemingly rational western world become so obsessed with the creation and retention of material wealth that the defining TV programme of the era was based solely on the concept of shopping and sex? I refer of course to Sex and the City, a show which now seems so hilariously outdated that a movie released earlier this year already looks anachronistic.

Another indication came this week that an era has ended: the news that Madonna, the Ur-Material Girl, and Guy Ritchie are to divorce. After having fed our desire for celebrity gossip for so long, the media hyped star couple finally called it quits, after -- guess -- eight years. So what's going on? Is our post-millenium hangover finally kicking in, eight years after the event? The Credit Crisis too has its roots in that new millenium fever that convinced us we were going to be richer than ever before and that it would be easier than ever before to get rich. Eight years on from the start of the boom, the bubble has finally burst.

The credit crisis came home to Switzerland this week too. A secret plan to boost UBS's coffers with government money was, well, kept secret until the very last minute and announced together with a package of other measures that will ensure that Switzerland continues to be known for its banking prowess rather than as being a country that used to be known for its banking prowess. The result is a partial privatisation of UBS that has left the bank's employees feeling rather bemused: we are no better than subsidized egg farmers, one of them told the NZZ newspaper. The difference being, I think, that you can't make an omelette out of collateralised debt obligations.

So, without getting too maudlin, it's all starting to feel rather fin de siecle around here. After spending eight years trying to keep up with the Ritchies by spending big on our credit cards, it seems we might be entering an entirely new era of austerity and prudence. Now is the time to be thinking about downsizing, cutting back, tightening the belt and all those other cliches that are used to describe the grim reality of a world in which a daily cup of Starbuck;s Cappuccino suddenly seems excessive and wasteful and a 100 gram bag of Marroni appears to be a healthy, nutritious and above all cheap alternative to starvation. In East Germany, apparently, sales of Marx's communist treatise "Das Kapital" are going through the roof. Now there's a sign.

Crisis? What crisis?

Anyone looking for a true gauge of investor sentiment, should look no further than a little corner of the Bahnhofstrasse. There, close to the HB, stand the stock market pundits of Switzerland. Forget the arm-waving doom-mongering of CNBC’s Jim Cramer. The plumily-delivered wisdom of Britain’s David Buik. The people who really know where its at are the stockwatchers of Bahnhofstrasse – and they are looking pretty gloomy.

Just next to shops selling jewels and furcoats, there is a UBS shop window with electronic display boards showing stock prices. While the shop windows have shone green for the past 5 years, indicating the rising prices of much of the world’s stocks, they have recently been glowing red – as stock markets around the world take a tumble. The Bahnhofstrasse stockwatchers gather with their migros and coop shopping bags, around the time of the US market open, and watch with morbid fascination as the western world’s wealth diminishes.

On Monday, the Swiss Market Index (SMI) had its worst day since September 11, with stocks tumbling. Later in the week, the Swiss National Bank joined the other central banks of the world in cutting interest rates by 50 basis points in an effort to give the endebted a break. The Swiss government also joined other European banks in reinforcing its commitment to guaranteeing Swiss savings up to the sum of 30,000 Swiss francs per person.

So far, however, and bear in mind that this is written and recorded hours and days before you get to hear it, there has not been any major collapses, bankruptcies or otherwise among the banks of Switzerland. Unlike Iceland, the week has been a relatively stable one for Switzerland’s financial institutions. While Europe goes to hell in a handcart, Switzerland appears to be sitting pretty. Ask someone on the street if they are bothered about the financial crisis and their answer will be ‘no’.

And why is that? Because unlike the UK, whose citizens have borrowed more than the value of the entire country’s economic output for a year, the Swiss don’t do debt. When did you last see someone buy a round of drinks on a credit card in Zurich? Never. They don’t own their own homes. They don’t buy and flip property. They don’t max out five credit cards and consolidate their debt into one easy repayment loan. Ok, as a result their economy might not show the kinds of amazing boom that Iceland or Ireland have shown in recent years, but it don’t shown the same levels of bust either.

What’s more, and I can’t confirm this is true but we can assume it is, the country is sitting on a huge pile of gold, the only asset that is appreciating. According to the Swiss National Bank, the country holds around 1,000 tonnes of Gold despite having sold some recently. One tonne of gold is worth around 30 million dollars so that would make Switzerland’s stash worth around 30 billion dollars or 30 thousand million to be precise. That is 30 thousand million dollars worth of hard assets. Quite reassuring.

And finally, another reason is that the Swiss are scrupulously honest. In the USA, when a banker loses billions or thousands of millions of other people’s money, the investors get none and the government gives them more. In Switzerland, it works differently. A news story caught my eye. A businessman leaves a Zurich carpark this week having mistakenly left his briefcase on the roof of his car. As he speeds off it falls to the ground and remains there for an hour before a woman picks it up. On opening it she finds his ID documents and 11,000 francs. To the amazement of the man and the police, she hands the money and the briefcase in. She is rewarded for her efforts with 1100 francs. Now if only Lehman Brothers would do the same.

Red Carpet Treatment

It is a dangerous time to be a banker: if the pressures of the biggest global crisis since the great depression of 1929 are not enough to drive you over the edge or give you a heart attack then your investors could well be plotting your downfall, cowering in the alley way behind your luxury penthouse waiting to clobber you with a bag of worthless collateralised debt obligations as soon as you step out of your Maserati.

No matter how bad it gets though, life as a Swiss banker still remains quite sheltered when compared to that of a German peer in the 1970s. As if being dogged by two oil crises were not enough, German bankers and industrialists and politicians were stalked by the stylishly dressed, BMW-driving nutters of the Baader Meinhof gang ? a group whose members were to terrorism what Posh and Becks are to football, only expect the terrorists gave fewer interviews to hello magazine.

The closest that Switzerland has ever come to organised terrorism (and I am excluding here the Jura separatist movement for reasons I shall explains) was the screening of a new German film about Baader Meinhof at the Zurich Film Festival earlier this week. Opening the festival, this film is a portrayal of the apparently slightly unhinged Andreas Baader and his antics in Germany in the 1970s leading up to his death in 1977.

Lending a touch of retro chic to the festival, it starred Germany's Leo Dicaprio Moritz Bleibtreu and was generally well received, although the apparently uncondemning portrayal of the terrorists attracted criticism from some quarters. The Zurich Film Festival certainly knows how to make waves, however. In just its fourth year, it is already building a profile both in Switzerland and beyond.

Part of its success is due to Zurich's readiness to embrace the movie: it has the highest number of cinemas per head of population than any other city. While I would argue that this has more to do with the fact that Zurich's older art-house cinemas have been kept alive intentionally, than any particularly keen cinemagoing streak in the Zurich mentality it is nonetheless an impressive feat and one that should be applauded.

It is also bringing an interesting dose of stariness to Zurich's otherwise deeply Zwinglian shores: the red carpet was rolled out for tow heroes of Hollywood this week, namely Messrs. Stallone and Fonda. Now, politically, it would seem that you couldn't have picked too more opposed Californian residents to come visit Switzerland: the Easy Riding Fonda being a vociferous Democrat and Mr. Stallone - well actually he is much bigger than me so I am not going to guess his political persuasions.

Licence to Thrill

They say the world is a small place. I don’t think that is strictly true – it’s the biggest place I know of – but there is an element of veracity in the fact that modern transportation means we can bump into our next door neighbour on the other side of the world. Since my next-door neighbours are Swiss, this happens more often than you might believe.

The Swiss are travellers: they have the disposable income and the time as well as that curiosity about the world that drives to the most out of the way places. Wherever you go, if there is one other foreigner in that remote mountain village the chances are they will be Swiss. And they will either be your next-door neighbour or have served in the military service with him.

The Swiss can be identified by their Mammut rain jackets or their Schoeffel hiking shirts, by their Swiss flag SIGG water bottles or their deft use of an army knife to create a small picnic in the middle of the jungle. Closer to home, there are other signs that set the Swiss apart – their Car licence plates for one.

Travel to northern Italy or the South of France in the spring time, pick the most attractive village you can find and then start counting the number of Swiss-plated cars you see there. There will be many. The Swiss have an ability to locate the prettiest places to spend their weekends, particularly when the weather on the southside of the alps is better than on the north. The Swiss licence plate quotient is usually a good indication of the quality of the place: if there are lots of cars with licence plates beginning with ZH and GE there, then you are in luck.

This week, Switzerland was shaken by the news that the growing number of cars registered on Swiss roads means that authorities are running out of numbers to assign to new cars. Inside of the two letter cantonal code plus up to six numbers currently employed, there may be a need to introduce 7 digit numbers. This would then potentially threaten the inclusion of the cantonal emblem on the licence plate – challenging the very core of Swiss identity and sparking an outcry the likes of which has not been seen since the redesign of the Swiss passport.

The Swiss licence plate is already something of an exception. Much like Switzerland itself in the world of homogenised European nations, the Swiss licence plate is willfully different from those of its neighbours: at the front the little thin tag requires carmakers to change the size of the mounting plates from the traditional Wide and long European size to the thin and skinny Swiss style and at the back the U.S. style square plate causes problems for those with cars designed to take the more conventional oblong form. Its no big deal but it is a nice reminder of the ways in which Switzerland differs from the countries around it.

Switzerland isn’t the only country with plates that tell of where the car is registered: france’s departments are clearly numbered on that country’s tags while Germany has a long list of the one two and three letter codes for each of its towns and cities. B, D, HH, M, MTK the list goes on.

But in terms of localness, quaintess and – dare I say it? – parochialness – the Swiss system with its Wappen really takes the biscuit.

A Swiss licence plate without a picture of a Bernese Bear, the white and blue Zurich crest or the Geneva crow and key combo appears to be more than the Swiss can contemplate. It would be another piece of their heritage eroded away and would mark the loss of an important pastime in Swiss society: namely honking ones horn at out of towners who dawdle along the streets of Zurich in their clearly labelled Aargau-plated cars.