Switzerland's central bank is a listed company anyone can buy shares in
Most central banks belong wholly to their governments. The Swiss National Bank has traded on the stock exchange since 1907. Cantons and cantonal banks hold most of the voting shares, but private investors own the rest, though however many they buy, their voting rights are capped at 100 shares.
Before the bank existed, Swiss money was a patchwork: at one point after 1826, some 53 commercial banks were printing their own notes. A constitutional revision in 1891 gave the federal state the sole right to issue banknotes, and a law of 6 October 1905 created the national bank, which opened for business on 20 June 1907. It keeps two head offices, in Bern and Zurich, and only won formal independence from government in May 2004 under Article 99 of the constitution.
Its wartime record remains contested. Before the Second World War it was continental Europe's biggest gold trading centre, and during the war it supplied the German Reichsbank with francs in exchange for gold. The Swiss Bergier commission concluded in 1998 that the bank took in 440 million dollars of gold from Nazi sources, of which about 316 million had probably been looted, echoing a 1997 US State Department study saying it must have known.
In modern crises it has acted boldly. During the 2008 financial crisis it absorbed around 60 billion dollars of troubled UBS assets into a special fund and, within a few years, exited them with a profit of 5 billion francs. On 6 September 2011 it vowed to hold the franc at no stronger than 1.20 per euro, promising to buy foreign currency in unlimited amounts, then abruptly dropped the ceiling on 15 January 2015.
Price stability is defined as consumer prices rising under 2 percent a year, and because policy acts with long delays, decisions follow inflation forecasts rather than current figures. An 11-member Bank Council oversees it, six of them appointed by the Federal Council and five chosen by shareholders.
Source: Swiss National Bank
