Switzerland Today

Dear Swiss Abroad,

For any of you looking for a last-minute Christmas gift, you may want to think twice about a Swiss Army knife. Well, at least if you live in Japan. Not everyone, everywhere sees the iconic knife as a helpful tool as one Japanese man learned the hard way.

More on this and other stories in today’s briefing. But first, the news.

© Keystone / Peter Schneider

In the News: Exporting war material, rejecting deportations of Eritreans and the final SWISS airplane returns from a pandemic pause.

• The Swiss government has been given more flexibility when it comes to approving the export of war material. Both chambers of parliament agreed to a new article in the War Material Act that allows the government to deviate from previous restrictions on such exports in exceptional cases. Opponents argue the new article is undemocratic.
• Switzerland will not deport Eritreans with rejected asylum applications to a third country such as Rwanda. On Tuesday, the House of Representatives rejected a motion calling for a pilot project for such deportations.
• The Swiss International Air Lines’ (SWISS) fleet is complete again: on Sunday, the airline retrieved the last of its aircraft from the Jordanian capital Amman. Twenty-five aircraft had been temporarily parked in Amman when passenger numbers plummeted during the pandemic. The warm and dry climate in Jordan is particularly suitable for parking aircraft for long periods of time. 
• The House of Representatives has followed the Senate in supporting a government proposal to classify Hamas as a terrorist group. This would allow financial flows to Hamas to be cut off. The two chambers still have to decide on the text of the law.

© Keystone / Michael Buholzer

The blame game for Credit Suisse continues. But above all, can anyone prevent it from happening again?

Swiss financial market supervisory authority FINMA released their report on lessons learned from the Credit Suisse debacle today. The report insists that FINMA took drastic measures to try to rein in Credit Suisse when it saw things deteriorating at the bank but there was only so much it could do under the law.

While hindsight is 20/20, the report suggests that if FINMA had more maneuvering room under the law it would have been able to ward off Credit Suisse’s downfall. How much of that is true we may never know but it’s clear that there’s a lot of finger pointing going on.

This was made even more apparent by a report in ReutersExternal link today, revealing that about six months before Credit Suisse was sold to rival UBS in a weekend rescue, the head of the Swiss central bank wanted to inject CHF50 billion ($57.6 billion) into the lender and nationalise it. However, FINMA and the government rejected the idea.

In fact, the head of the Swiss National Bank started worrying about Credit Suisse as early as 2020 but phrased warnings in a way not to send the public into a panic. There was no avoiding panic when it became clear that rescuing Credit Suisse was the only way to save the economy and face.

FINMA is one of the weakest bank regulators in the world points out Reuters so giving it greater supervision would be a good step. But how much and will it be enough? That’s the question as Switzerland looks ahead and finds itself with a bank (UBS) that has a balance sheet ($1.6 trillion), nearly twice the size of the Swiss economy.

Gaetan Bally/Keystone

The Swiss enjoy their Swiss army knife exception – but not in Japan as one man learned the hard way.

Is a pocketknife a weapon or a tool? The answer depends on where you live. As my colleagues reported today, a man in Japan was convicted of carrying a dangerous object and fined 9,900 yen (CHF60). The “dangerous” object was a Swiss Army Knife that the man received as a gift from an acquaintance in the 1990s.

Such a judgment would be unthinkable in Switzerland, write my colleagues. It is a criminal offence to carry a dangerous object in Switzerland too but there are exceptions, including for a pocketknife. The iconic blade isn’t considered a weapon while a baseball bat on the other hand, is if it is taken into a bar (as opposed to a baseball field).

Pocketknives are so far from being considered dangerous in Switzerland that they are often given to children as young as four year old to “play with” in the forest. Sure, it isn’t the same size or shape blade as the adult versions and doesn’t have a corkscrew but it isn’t harmless. There are plenty of kids that come home with a few cuts on the fingers.

Victorinox, which makes the famous blade, admitted that it’s hard to keep up with all the rules in different countries. It’s also come up with some adaptations of the original knife to work around certain restrictions.

But at least for now, it’s safe (from a legal perspective) to carry a pocketknife in Switzerland.