2025 has been a turbulent year so far. On April 2, 2025, the US president announced Liberation Day, promising import tariff increases for many trading partners. The announcement and the resulting rise in economic uncertainty has been associated with a large decline of economic activity in Switzerland and beyond. In this blog, we try to provide some first evidence on whether this fall in economic activity has been accompanied by a drop in expenditures.
To this end, we use the newly published, weekly consumer spending index (CSI), which is based on expenditure data provided by Worldline Schweiz AG. The dashboards of the index and the white paper documenting its construction are available here. The dashboards provide weekly information on expenditures across regions and expenditure categories in Switzerland. The time series are available since 2018, allowing for a consistent interpretation of medium-term trends alongside recent changes in expenditures.[1]
Figure 1: Year-on-year changes in 2025 of the consumer spending index (CSI) and the SECO index of economic activity.
Notes: CSI index is available here. SECO index of economic activity is available here. Both time series are based on four-week backward-looking moving averages.
Figure 1 shows the weekly SECO index on economic activity together with the consumer spending index (CSI). The figure reveals that the index for economic activity has declined sharply since Liberation Day, as recently noticed by Matthias Benz in the NZZ. Exports and imports play a significant role in that index, which makes it intuitive that the index reacted strongly to the announcements on Liberation Day; and even in anticipation of them, as traders tried to shift trades before that day.
Figure 1 further shows that consumer spending has remained relatively stable in the immediate aftermath of Liberation Day. Further inspection of the CSI data by expenditure category reveals that the stability is particularly driven by robust spending in retail. It will be interesting to find out in the coming months whether expenditure growth will eventually decrease as well, or whether consumer spending will continue to stabilize the domestic economic activity in Switzerland.
[1] The dashboards of Monitoring Consumption Switzerland (MCS) document the expenditure data as is. The dashboards of the consumer spending index (CSI) document time series based on the same data as the MCS but correct for shifts of cash to card expenditures and merchant churn, allowing to interpret medium-term trends as well as recent expenditure shifts.