Epstein files, Fed chair nominee – and a new nuclear arms race?

A mushroom cloud at the Nevada Test Site on June 24, 1957. (US Energy Department via AP, File) Keystone/Swissinfo

Welcome to our press review of events in the United States. Every Wednesday I look at how the Swiss media have reported and reacted to three major stories in the US – in politics, finance and science.

It doesn’t happen often, but this week Swiss newspapers congratulated US President Donald Trump on making a half-decent decision: his nomination of Kevin Warsh as the next chair of the Federal Reserve. But “even a good Fed chair can do little to stop the dollar’s decline”, pointed out the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

A document with an email chain from Jeffrey Epstein illustrates the amount of redactions of personally identifiable information made by the US Department of Justice. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick) Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

“The Epstein case, the American abyss” – Swiss newspapers didn’t hold back in venting their disappointment following the latest revelations in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

“One begins to wonder: who was actually not acquainted with Epstein?” the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) wrote on Monday, three days after the US Department of Justice released a final cache of millions of documents related to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – who died in prison in 2019 – and his interactions with the rich and powerful. “Resignations like that of Harvard professor Larry Summers remain rare. The chance that real and alleged victims of Epstein and friends will ever find satisfaction is minimal.”

“How can we still trust the US government?” asked Le Temps in Geneva, complaining that the latest documents were incomplete, the identity of the victims had not been protected, and mentions of US President Donald Trump had been carefully redacted.

“The disappointment is immense, but it was to be expected in an administration where the Department of Justice now seems to exist primarily to achieve political goals. At a time when the Capitol Hill rioters are being promoted as patriotic heroes […], the idea that genuine transparency could be established in a case in which the Commander in Chief’s name appears several thousand times was nothing more than a pipe dream.”

For Le Temps, the involvement of a former Democratic president, Bill Clinton, “in what is certainly one of the biggest scandals in US political history”, completes a “formidable disappointment” with the ruling elites – “in a country whose institutions seem more than ever to be teetering on the edge of a precipice”.

The NZZ reckoned Clinton was in more trouble than Trump. “The Republicans in Congress have invited him and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to a hearing,” it reported. “They are thus executing the White House’s strategy, namely the more the Clintons are in the spotlight, the better for Trump’s image.” Having previously refused to testify, on Tuesday the Clintons agreed to do so to avoid being found in contempt of Congress.

“Donald Trump has the upper hand in the selective exploitation of the Epstein affair as long as the Republicans are in the majority in Congress,” the NZZ concluded. “While the revelations are unlikely to have any concrete political or legal consequences, the Epstein Files are damaging to the entire political, business, academic and entertainment elite. Many voters will have the impression that they are dealing with a completely rotten establishment.”

• ‘The Epstein case, the American abyss’External link – editorial in Le Temps (French)

• ‘Trump has the upper hand in the exploitation of the Epstein Files’External link – editorial in the NZZ (German, paywall)

• Bill and Hillary Clinton now want to testify after allExternal link – SRF (German)

Kevin Warsh is a ‘conservative economist of the old Republican guard’, according to Swiss public broadcaster SRF. EPA/Will Oliver Keystone

On Friday US President Donald Trump picked Kevin Warsh to head the US Federal Reserve, the country’s central bank, when Jerome Powell’s term ends in May. Swiss media cautiously welcomed the decision.

“The President has made a good choice in Warsh,” the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) said on Friday, pointing to his economic expertise, crisis management skills and Washington experience. “With so many plus points, there is of course a catch: Warsh is also in favour of lower interest rates. If this weren’t the case, Trump wouldn’t have allowed him to take part in the selection process.”

Trump wants a central bank that stimulates the economy and boosts his popularity, the NZZ said. “Whether Warsh will do him this favour is questionable at least. If the 55-year-old has not completely set aside his previous convictions on monetary policy, disappointments in the White House are inevitable.”

Warsh, who still has to be sworn in by the Senate, is regarded as a “conservative economist of the old Republican guard”, according to Swiss public broadcaster SRF. “If Kevin Warsh takes his task and his commitment to political independence seriously, he won’t become Donald Trump’s puppet. Nevertheless, it’s foreseeable that the political pressure from the White House won’t let up. In recent months Warsh has publicly supported Trump’s call for significant interest rate cuts.”

Le Temps in Geneva described Warsh as a “doveish hawk”. “Neither too hawkish nor too doveish: in appointing Kevin Warsh as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, Donald Trump opted for orthodoxy,” it wrote.

However, even the best central banker in the world can do little against an economic policy that is fuelling inflation, the NZZ noted on Saturday. “The US is likely to pile up an additional two trillion dollars in debt this year under Donald Trump. This gigantic deficit will be fuelled by new military spending and tax giveaways. The country, which is already sitting on a mountain of debt that exceeds its annual economic output, can’t really afford this. This is why the dollar is weakening, while the franc and gold are gaining strongly. There is no prospect of a rapid improvement.”

• Reaction in the NZZ on FridayExternal link and SaturdayExternal link (German, paywall)

• SRF analysisExternal link (German)

• Reaction in Le TempsExternal link (French)

• Who is Kevin Warsh?External link – Tages-Anzeiger (German, paywall)

US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sign the newly completed ‘New START’ treaty in 2010. (AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel) Keystone

The New START agreement, a nuclear arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia, expires on Thursday. Without mutual verification of atomic arsenals, the risk of miscalculation increases, warns Le Temps in Geneva.

“In the whirlwind of global geopolitics, the expiry on February 5 of the New START treaty on the reduction of strategic weapons is not insignificant,” Le Temps wrote in an editorial on Tuesday.

Concluded in Geneva in 2010, the treaty brought security stability between Russia and the US, which together possess 86% of the world’s nuclear weapons, it said. It was the final building block in the nuclear arms control architecture begun by Nixon and Brezhnev, developed by Bush and Gorbachev and continued by Obama and Medvedev, the newspaper explained. However, the two countries’ current presidents, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, “have proved incapable of negotiating a new agreement, despite their apparent ‘friendship’”.

The good news, according to Le Temps, is that we are far from the 70,000 nuclear warheads held by the two superpowers in the 1960s. The less good news is that with increasingly advanced technologies and ultra-powerful bombs, Moscow and Washington today have much more dangerous arsenals. “We cannot rule out a new nuclear arms race – in terms of both quantity and quality,” it wrote.

Le Temps pointed out that strategic stability had only been possible thanks to the trust that had been strengthened by the mutual inspections carried out under New START. “Without trust, the risk of miscalculation in the event of a nuclear alert increases tenfold,” it said.

“Some of the United States’ allies, who feel betrayed by Donald Trump’s America, are thinking of perhaps one day acquiring nuclear weapons to compensate for the loss of American security guarantees. They include Germany, South Korea and Japan. It’s therefore high time that humanity rejected the inevitability of nuclear weapons.”

• US-Russia: towards a new nuclear arms race?External link – Le Temps editorial (French)

• ‘A new nuclear arms race has in fact already begun’External link – Blick (German)

• Swiss press reaction to the signing of the New Start agreement – Swissinfo, 2010

• Why Swiss government refuses to sign the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – Swissinfo, 2024

The next edition of ‘Swiss views of US news’ will be published on Wednesday, February 11. See you then!

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