‘Bought nothing’: Swiss economics minister defends US tariff deal

Parmelin on agreement with US: "We haven't bought anything" Keystone-SDA

Economics Minister Guy Parmelin has responded to criticism of Switzerland’s customs agreement with the United States. In an interview on Monday with the newspapers of CH Media and the online platform ajour.ch, he denied Switzerland had bought anything.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

“Swiss companies have simply told us their investment intentions that they want to make in the US in the coming years,” Parmelin said in response to a statement that Switzerland has “bought itself free”. The Swiss companies would also have wanted to make these investments otherwise, he claimed.

+ Switzerland secures US tariff rate cut to 15%

“There is also no obligation for Switzerland or the companies to make these investments,” he said.

Parmelin also considered it “absolutely realistic” that the Swiss economy would invest CHF200 billion ($250 billion) in the US over the next five years.

“The figures and intentions are from the companies themselves. They have construction projects, some of which have already been approved,” he said.

The targets may be missed by “a couple of billion”, he said, “but the orders of magnitude are certainly right”.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

How we work 

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail]