Satire mocks finance salesman while UBS escapes scrutiny
Saturday 15th August 2026 on 12:00 in
Switzerland
SRF columnist Renato Kaiser argues that Switzerland laughs at a Zurich finance salesman while looking away from the conduct of its major banks.
The salesman became an online sensation after appearing in SRF’s street interview format Donat on the road. He spoke about the “Market Huddle” and listed “Strait of Hormuz, AI, Private Credits, everything that makes market go round, right”. His claim that he was “chatty” and liked talking to people helped trigger a flood of memes, videos, articles and advertisements.
People also mocked his answer that he earned “multiple hundred”. But Kaiser says the joke was that he used the phrase, not that he actually earned that amount, or what he did to earn it.
He argues that the public accepts finance professionals praising exchange-traded funds and private credit, responding only with harmless ridicule. Meanwhile, people responsible for the collapses of Credit Suisse and UBS have faced no comparable public reckoning, he writes. Some former Credit Suisse officials are still allowed to keep their bonuses and have faced no consequences or fines.
Kaiser turns to the so-called Lex UBS. He writes that UBS, itself rescued by the state nearly 20 years ago, was allowed to absorb another major bank that had spectacularly failed, again with financial support from Switzerland as a whole.
The Federal Council proposed new rules this week under which those responsible for mistakes would have to bear the consequences. Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter has said, in Kaiser’s telling, that decency apparently cannot be regulated.
The Swiss Bankers Association has rejected the rules. In an official statement, it called for a careful examination of viable alternatives to the proposed maximum approach and an overall assessment of all planned measures to avoid unnecessary burdens on the financial centre and the real economy.
The new banking law will still be debated by Parliament, so it remains unclear whether UBS will ultimately have to make fundamental changes. Kaiser says doubts remain, in “multiple hundred thousand” quantities.