Sadly, breaking up a bar of chocolate does not reduce the total number of calories. Still, Philipp Hildebrand, the next head of the Swiss central bank, seems to think that reducing the size of its large international banks – for which read UBS and Credit Suisse – might make them less risky. Ostensibly, Berne has reason to be concerned: last year, the assets of the two banks were six times Switzerland’s gross domestic product. Yet there is nothing new about the outsized scale of the financial services industry relative to the economy nor evidence that smaller banks can easily be allowed to fail.

As recently as the 1990s, when Swiss cantonal banks ran into difficulty, they had to be rescued by their bigger Swiss peers. Running UBS’s and Credit Suisse’s wealth, investment banking and domestic banking businesses as autonomous units with independent capital and risk-taking frameworks – rather than breaking up the banks outright – is a better solution.