Hildebrand: "The 2016 political earthquake was a huge warning shot"
There is hardly any other Swiss event where so many media and advertising professionals mingle with figures from the worlds of business, politics, and public life as at the annual Tagi Meeting at Zurich’s Schiffbau. There were also quite a few financial experts in attendance on Tuesday; after all, the keynote speaker was Philipp Hildebrand, former head of the Swiss National Bank (SNB), who had to cancel his appearance five years ago for reasons that are well known.
After Tagi publisher Pietro Supino had called for the promotion of media competence as a counterweight to post-factuals and alternative facts and emphasized the importance of professional reporting against any form of propaganda in his welcome address, Hildebrand outlined the current situation in the USA. Since the start of Bill Clinton's presidency in 1993, 25 million Americans have fallen out of the middle class - while enormous profits have been made on the financial markets.
Social explosives in the middle class
The loser of globalization in the USA is therefore the white middle class in the lower and middle income brackets. According to Hildebrand, the increasingly rapid pace of technological development is also robbing these people of their hope that there will be an upturn for them again. Whereas in 1980, 85 jobs were needed to generate 1 million US dollars, today only 5 jobs are needed for the same value creation. The USA is therefore sitting on a ticking time bomb. And with it the whole world.
The tool to break this knot is "inclusive growth", of which Switzerland is a prime example, emphasized Hildebrand. Switzerland, too, must ensure that it does not squander its good position. Above all, representatives of academia, the media, politics and the financial sector must have the courage to tell the truth. This is especially true at a time when terms such as "post-factual" and "alternative facts" cause more amusement than the necessary outrage and reaction.
Hildebrand emphasized that only a growth policy aimed at increasing productivity could prevent a development similar to that in the US in the long term. The political earthquake that shook the world in 2016 was a huge warning shot to which we must respond immediately, Hildebrand concluded with an urgent warning.
Photos and report: Anne-Friederike Heinrich
