Business World

The fairy tale tram rattles along Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich’s posh shopping street, beneath the twinkling Christmas lights as if this was just any other year.

Inside the tram, children listen to tales of Santa Claus, outside their parents rush from shop to shop, loaded with bags, ignoring the tales of global economic doom and gloom.

Retailers are rejoicing about record sales and a table in restaurants is as hard to get as a hotel room in ski resorts.

While recession has already turned into the nightmare before Christmas elsewhere, the Swiss are still enjoying the benefits of a five-year long boom which has added thousands of jobs and boosted wages in the already prosperous country.

“I am still shopping and will continue to do so,” said Edith Weibel Sovilla.

“I, personally, have not felt any impact from the crisis, but I am watching it and will watch it in the future,” the communications worker said whilst browsing in a posh Max Mara shop in Zurich.

The Swiss will ultimately not be able to just shop away the recession, which the government expects to be the worst since 1991 as demand from elsewhere in the world slows, weighing on exports, the country’s main driver of growth.

But the $490 billion economy, which some feared might face an Iceland-style meltdown after the subprime-related write-downs of its largest bank UBS of some $50 billion, appears to be in pole position to make it through the crisis as a winner no fax pay day loans.

“Switzerland has got almost everything right over the last five years,” said Holger Schmieding, European chief economist at Bank of America. “They are now well placed to weather the recession and to be at the forefront in the next recovery.”

The Swiss economy has grown faster than the euro zone over the last five years and while the Swiss government sees the economy shrinking by 0.8 percent next year, many forecasts for the euro zone and the United States are much more depressing.

“The recession in Switzerland will be less deep than in the euro area,” said Andres Fuentes, the Organization for Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) expert for Switzerland.

The 7.6 million Swiss are among the world’s highest per capita earners and the country of snow-capped mountains and crystal-clear lakes tops international rankings when it comes to quality of life as well as economic competitiveness.

Even 18 months into the crisis, the country is close to full-employment with a jobless rate of just 2.7 percent.

Many of its high-quality products ranging from watches, chocolate and medicines to solar cells and machinery, look better positioned to weather the downturn than other branches such as Germany’s and America’s car industry.

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