Central Bank

The Swiss National Bank unveiled the second note in its new banknote series on Wednesday. The new 20 franc note, which will be in circulation from May 17th, follows the release of the first in the series, the 50 franc note, last year.
Overall, the National Bank’s new series of banknotes is intended to reflect “the many facets of Switzerland”. The design of each note centers around a primary theme. On the 20-franc note, this will be light. A hand, the earth and butterflies are the main motifs on the note.

The International Bank Note Society (IBNS) announces that its voting membership has selected the Swiss National Bank to receive its prestigious “Bank Note of the Year Award” for 2016. With almost 120 new banknotes released worldwide during 2016, over half were of sufficiently new design to be eligible for nomination. The Swiss note only narrowly beat the Maldive Islands 1000 Rufiyaa bill, Argentina’s 500 Peso jaguar, and the Royal Bank of Scotland’s 5 Pound first polymer note.

Switzerland’s central bank posted a profit of 7.9 billion Swiss francs ($7.95 billion) in the first quarter, it said Thursday, boosted by gains from the huge foreign currency reserves built up during its long campaign to weaken the Swiss franc.

The Swiss National Bank made a profit of 5.3 billion francs on its foreign currency holdings that rose to 683.18 billion francs at the end of March, a figure larger than Swiss GDP. The bank also made a profit of 2.2 billion francs from a valuation gain on the gold it holds, and 466.4 million francs from negative interest rates it has charged on the sight deposit accounts it holds for commercial banks. The SNB is not required to make a profit, with its main mandate to ensure price stability in Switzerland defined as annual inflation of under 2 percent. But a portion of any profit it does make is distributed to the Swiss government and the country’s 26 cantons.

The Swiss National Bank stands ready to defend the franc with interest-rate cuts and market interventions if investors pile into the haven currency in response to the French elections, said SNB President Thomas Jordan said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.

“We hope that a reasonable candidate can win, somebody who is in favor of free markets, but we cannot exclude that there will be more pressure on the Swiss franc,” Jordan explained in Washington, on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund spring meetings. “But as you know we also have our instruments to react to such a situation.”

The Swiss government on Tuesday acknowledged the country’s reappearance on a U.S. Treasury watch list of currency manipulators, but said the status would have no immediate consequences, as Reuters reported.

Switzerland met two of the three criteria to be named a manipulator, both in the most recent report and the previous one in October: it runs a material current account surplus and it engages in persistent, one-sided intervention in foreign exchange markets.

With the reliability of a finely-tuned watch, the latest release of foreign-currency reserves held at the Swiss National Bank has shown yet another record, in a sign the central bank continues to swim against the tide. The foreign exchange reserves jumped by nearly 15 billion Swiss francs ($14.93 billion) in March.

The SNB held 683.181 billion francs worth of foreign currency at the end of March, compared with 668.332 billion francs in February, revised from an originally reported 668.18 billion, preliminary data calculated according to the standards of the International Monetary Fund showed.
The franc fell to about 1.07 francs to the euro after the data release, which followed news of U.S. missile strikes against an airbase in Syria that prompted inflows into assets considered safe havens.

Manipulation of the gold price has been going on for decades, and no one has gone to prison or been fined. Price discovery in the gold market has been eliminated. This is scandalous.

Switzerland’s central bank bought another 67.1 billion Swiss francs ($67.6 billion) worth of foreign currencies in 2016, almost a quarter less than the previous year, in its effort to fight the appreciation of the safe-haven franc. The sum, published in the central bank’s annual report on Thursday, compares with a 2015 tally of 86.1 billion francs and a record of 188 billion spent in 2012.
"These interventions occurred mainly at times of heightened uncertainty, when the Swiss franc was particularly sought after as a safe investment," the Swiss National Bank said in its annual report published on Thursday.