Table of Contents

• In umbra Vesuvii saltamus

• Few numbers

• The great downgrading

• Between cantonal tax scales and automatic exchange …

• B-R & H Finance

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Market Review

In umbra Vesuvii saltamus

(Dancing in the shadow of the Vesuvio)
In late August of 79 AD, the people of Pompeii lived at the foot of a mountain they treated as part of the scenery, until the day Vesuvius hurled a burning cloud that buried the city under nearly six metres of ash in less than two days. As I write these lines, on my birthday, which I happen to be celebrating in Pompeii, I cannot help thinking of those 2,000 people struck down among the 20,000 inhabitants of the city at the time, hit by heat of over 500 degrees (and we complain about heatwaves…) without even having time to raise their arms to protect themselves. Today, close to a million people once again live within range of a potential eruption, a bit like us as investors, still contemplating postcard‑perfect markets, with low volatility and indices near their highs, all the while knowing that under our feet, the geopolitical, fiscal and monetary plates are still on the move.

A brief bout of panic

On 23 June, the KOSPI dropped almost 10%, triggering a trading halt as forced selling hit leveraged ETFs tied to Samsung and SK Hynix. At the same time, the PHLX Semiconductor Index gave up nearly 8% in a single session, one of its worst falls since 2020. The 23 June sell‑off dragged down the Nasdaq and the S&P 500, leaving both indices in negative territory for the month. Our Data Centres basket (see table) is still strongly positive year‑to‑date, up 55.20% with a total market cap of Usd 3.15 trn, but it slipped 1.35% over the month.
More value‑oriented markets held up better: the SMI, IBEX and Nikkei gained between 3% and 6% in June, while the MSCI World fell 0.7%.

Rates, commodities and Bitcoin

Sovereign yields remain elevated, the US yield curve is still inverted, and investors are pricing policy rates above 4% for much of 2026. Brent crude has eased sharply since the spring and now trades around Usd 70–75, tracking the back‑and‑forth of talks between Washington and Tehran. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s slide continues, with the price hovering around Usd 58.5k (Strategy Inc is down 45% on the month, which was always a risk). Silver is trading at roughly half its high for the year, around Usd 60 per ounce.

Few numbers

Report back from Art Basel, Basel 2026: the upper segment of the market was decidedly active. We walked the aisles and did not feel the same exuberance nor hear much English spoken (Americans seemed to be focusing on Art Basel, Paris instead).

• Pablo Picasso, Le peintre et son modèle dans un paysage (1963) — Usd 35 million — sold by Hauser & Wirth on the very first day. Presented as a late‑period canvas painted in the open air, the work found a buyer at the asking price within hours.

• Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (940‑7) (2015) — Usd 20 million — also sold by Hauser & Wirth.

• David Hockney, Studio Interior no. 2 (2014) — Usd 8.5 million — sold by GRAY (Chicago), just as news broke of Hockney’s death in early June.

An excellent overview is offered by artnet and by The Art Newspaper

Editorial

The great downgrading

Some countries grow poorer slowly, like a cellar being emptied without anyone checking the labels. First you live off the income from your assets, then you start eating into the capital and, as the slope steepens, you stop protecting the future: you mortgage the present.

What is new today is that the wealth itself has not vanished. It has simply moved. Globalisation has shifted the epicentres of value creation towards the United States, Asia, and above all towards a handful of sectors capable of generating capital at a speed unknown to the old patrimonial economies. The result borders on cruel: the newly‑rich of San Francisco, Shenzhen or Bangalore end up buying the stone of Paris, the house in Saint‑Tropez, the chalet in Saint‑Moritz, the handbag that carries its own name, or a grandmother’s portrait by Foujita.

For years we have repeated that a fortune rarely survives three generations. The grandfather builds, the father maintains, the children squander. It is a moralist’s formula, but it becomes a political lens once you apply it to a country. First you privatise. Then you take on debt. Next comes the fiscal temptation: when you can no longer tax growth, you tax savings. The problem is that the capacity to tax is not infinite. It protects for a while, but ends up slowing precisely what it is meant to preserve.

When the G7 was born in the mid‑1970s, most of its members still held the best possible rating from S&P or Moody’s, with AAA status taken for granted. Fifty years later, the picture has changed: the United States lost its last AAA at Moody’s in 2025, dropping into the zone of “plain” AA, while within the G7 only Germany and Canada still retain a top rating from at least one of the two main agencies, in a global club of AAA sovereigns that has shrunk to barely a dozen countries. What stands out is not only how small this club has become, but how far it has shifted. The heavyweight AAA issuers are now often smaller but very disciplined economies, while the former fiscal powerhouses are piling up debt and interest at a pace the IMF considers worrying for growth. This is not a technical nuance; it is a change of regime. When the cost of servicing the debt grows faster than the wealth produced, the state stops looking like a long‑term investor and starts to resemble an over‑indebted household, devoting an ever‑larger share of its budget to yesterday’s interest instead of tomorrow’s projects. France illustrates this slide: public debt is now above 110% of GDP, and projections point to annual interest charges that could approach Eur 100 billion by 2029 if nothing changes, making debt service the state’s single largest budget item. The downgrading of a country always ends up, sooner or later, showing through on a family’s account statement.

In pre‑euro France, a fortune of Ffr 100 million would, without question, have placed its owner among the “great fortunes”. Today, Eur 15 million buys a very comfortable life, but not necessarily the kind of affluence that gets you noticed by an American private banker at a cocktail party in Orange County. Globalisation has altered the scale: what once counted as great national wealth now increasingly amounts to solid but unremarkable affluence at a global level. The family fortune that used to act as a shield becomes just another taxable base.

Meanwhile, others are making fortunes at an unprecedented pace. The stock‑market listing of SpaceX, for example, is estimated to have created over 4,400 new millionaires and nearly 400 centi‑millionaires among its employees and former employees, according to Hill.com, as reported by several media outlets. It is one of the largest events of individual wealth creation ever linked to an IPO, with fortunes born in a matter of hours on the shop floor, in engineering offices and even in the company canteens.

In truth, the great downgrading is not just another statistic. It is the moment when a state and its citizens find themselves in the position once occupied by certain families: living on their income, selling a little of their assets, then rather more, before asking what will be left to pass on. At that stage, the only question that matters, for a country as for a household, is the same: do we want to own our future, or merely lease out our past?

Yet there is also a lesson in restraint hidden inside this great downgrading. A fortune, a country, a civilisation is held together not just by the quality of its memories, but by its ability to generate new income. When that capacity withers, the wealth turns into a museum. And a museum, however elegant, always survives on the same basic equation: someone else must pay the entrance fee.

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Wealth

Between cantonal tax scales and automatic exchange of information: Switzerland’s new tax map

Wealth tax

KPMG’s updated 2026 report, Clarity of Swiss Taxes, notes that Switzerland remains one of the few OECD countries to apply an annual wealth tax, levied exclusively at cantonal and communal level. Maximum cantonal rates sit in a band of roughly 0.13% to 0.86% according to PwC, placing Switzerland above many European countries that no longer apply a true wealth tax, but still clearly below the one‑off “super‑tax” experiments periodically floated elsewhere.

Technically, the taxable base is the Swiss tax resident’s worldwide net worth: bank accounts, securities, shareholdings, crypto‑assets, works of art (not always) and other valuable assets are all included after deducting debts, with allowances that can reach Chf 100'000 to 200'000 for a couple depending on the canton. Foreign real estate is, in principle, taxed where it is located, but it is still taken into account to determine the applicable rate, which increases the importance of the progressive tax tables and bracket thresholds. For a wealthy taxpayer, canton of residence is therefore a quantifiable parameter, not just a lifestyle choice.

The city of Zurich illustrates how this works. The canton applies a progressive wealth‑tax scale, to which a communal multiplier is added to arrive at the final burden. Municipal multipliers vary and create a tax map within the canton itself: a Zurich taxpayer is not just choosing a canton but effectively a municipality, with measurable consequences for their combined income‑plus‑wealth‑tax bill. In practice, though, intra‑cantonal differences remain modest compared with the contrast between low‑tax central Swiss cantons and heavier‑tax urban cantons.

Income tax

On income tax, national comparisons show a clear “corridor” between high‑ and low‑tax cantons. Recent syntheses place Zug, Schwyz and Nidwalden among the most attractive in terms of top marginal rates, with maximum rates around 22% to 24% for high incomes. At the other end of the spectrum, Geneva, Vaud and Bern regularly appear among the highest‑tax cantons, with top marginal rates that can exceed 40% (around 41% to 43% on the upper brackets according to 2024–26 statistics).

Corporate tax

For companies, the phased introduction of the qualified domestic minimum top‑up tax (QDMTT) on 1 January 2024 and then the income inclusion rule (IIR) on 1 January 2025, under Pillar 2 (a 15% minimum effective tax rate for groups with more than Eur 750 million in revenue), further harmonises the tax environment for large groups without directly touching individuals’ wealth tax.

Transparency as the third pillar

The OECD Global Forum’s 2026 capacity‑building report highlights that 172 jurisdictions now apply the standards for exchange of information on request (EOIR) and automatic exchange of information (CRS), and that more than 20,000 tax officials were trained in 2025 to use these tools. For cross‑border structures involving Swiss and European residents, this means that arrangements built on opacity – undeclared shell companies, omitted accounts, gaps between economic reality and the registers – are increasingly detectable. The main risk is less the shift in a cantonal rate than the retroactive challenge to a structure deemed non‑compliant.

In conclusion

The attraction of this Swiss tax “cluster” lies in the way these layers fit together: a moderate but permanent wealth tax, competitive income taxation and a generally favourable regime for private capital gains, all within an environment that is becoming ever more transparent.

In this setting, Swiss wealth planning is moving away from the hunt for “niches” towards the construction of robust, aligned structures: a clearly assumed cantonal domicile, explicit holding vehicles, consistent documentation across jurisdictions and reporting that anticipates automatic information exchange. For families with substantial assets in Zurich, the key question is no longer just whether they pay 0.25% or 0.35% in wealth tax, but whether the way that wealth is structured will withstand twenty years of gradual tightening in international standards.

B-R & H Finance

Founded in 2004, B-R & H Finance SA is a Swiss entity specialized in wealth management. We offer a full range of personalized and independent investment services and advisory solutions. Regulated by SO-Fit and authorized by FINMA, we are also members of the ASG (Swiss Association of Independent Asset Managers) and work with leading custodian banks.

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