Central Bank Super Thursday comes alive, with the announcement on rates by the Swiss National Bank (SNB), the Swiss central bank.
The institution announced that it has raised the reference rates by 50 basis points, bringing them to 1%. It is the third monetary tightening launched by the central bank.
Inflation in Switzerland remains well above the SNB’s target of between zero and 2%, albeit at a much lower level than the numbers for other European economies.
Switzerland’s inflation rate stood at 3% in November, slowing down from the record of the last thirty years, equal to 3.5%, tested in August.
The first tightening by the Swiss National Bank came unexpectedly, for the first time in 15 years, in June, with a rise that took rates from -0.75% to -0.25%.
In fact, negative rates continued to persist in Switzerland, also adopted in the Eurozone by the ECB and still in effect in Japan, with the Bank of Japan.
On 22 September, the SNB then raised rates by 75 basis points.
In today’s press release from the Swiss central bank, we read that the monetary tightening was launched to counter a further “spread of inflation”.