Could a 164-year-old Swiss giant quit Switzerland?

October 21, 2026 — 11:00am

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It’s almost unthinkable, but it is being spoken out loud. UBS, which can trace its Swiss origins back to 1862, is actively considering whether it should change its domicile.

Next week the lower house of the Swiss parliament will debate a proposal from their colleagues in the upper house that would force the bank to capitalise its offshore subsidiaries almost entirely with equity.

UBS says that would require it to hold about $US16 billion ($23 billion) of additional common equity tier one (CET1) capital, diluting its shareholder returns and rendering the businesses uncompetitive with its global counterparts.

The parliamentarians’ motivation is obvious. They’re afraid of history being repeated.

After the 2008 financial crisis, the Swiss government was forced to provide about $US60 billion of capital, liquidity and other relief to bail out UBS, which had plunged heavily into sub-prime mortgages in the US and experienced more than $US40 billion of losses when that market imploded.

An old spectre has returned to haunt Europe and things could get ugly

Three years ago, the government had to provide more than $400 billion of liquidity support to Credit Suisse when a run, sparked by the regional bank crisis in the US, threatened to topple the country’s second-largest bank.

The government oversaw the forced merger of Credit Suisse into UBS and provided both a liquidity backstop and a $15 billion indemnity against losses within Credit Suisse’s portfolio. The guarantee was never called on and the liquidity support was repaid within months.

That merger of its two largest banks created a bank with $US1.7 trillion of assets – about 149 per cent of Switzerland GDP.

UBS became........

© Brisbane Times