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.