Switzerland could start reducing the coronavirus-induced debt pile in two to three years and finish repaying it over 15 years, the finance ministry said Saturday.
In a best case scenario, the debt could hit 20 billion Swiss francs ($21.15 billion), finance minister Ueli Maurer said in an interview. He added that, otherwise the debt could hit 35 billion, which is still less than the originally estimated 40 billion francs.
The government said it anticipates a budget deficit of around 1 billion francs next year. It has yet to decide on how to pay back the debt it has accumulated to aid business, but Maurer stressed that the government would not raise taxes.
He said a likely option for debt reduction was to earmark yearly profit distributions the state gets from the Swiss National Bank, and called for spending discipline: “It cannot be that we print money to pay state debt”, he said.
