A VAR analysis of Swiss data from 1987 to 2015 provides no evidence for significant long and short run influence of leverage on GDP, credit and the interest rate spread. Increasing capital requirements for banks should therefore have no strong negative macroeconomic effects.

Ten years after the worst financial crisis of the post-war period, Switzerland has established a Too-Big-To-Fail (TBTF) framework. Under this framework, the two large Swiss banks are subject to substantial capital requirements. It is not obvious whether the TBTF capital requirements are...