The FT‘s David Keohane notes that the Swiss franc has soared away from the price floor imposed by the Swiss National Bank in September 2009:
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It’s now at its weakest level since May 2011. Keohane writes:
The SNB, so long a place of tortured howls and unreserved reserve accumulation, must be a happy central bank right now. Maybe happy enough to start buying back some of the Swiss currency it has been throwing out there over the past year and a half?
Maintaining the currency floor has been an arduous task for the SNB. As I wrote earlier this month:
Although currency speculators have been battering at the floor, the Swiss central bank has held to its promise (but it did drop down to 1.1997 francs for a few minutes back in April last year) by buying a metric shittonne (technical term) of eurobonds. Now that it owns so many of those, it is trying to diversify its holdings into other currencies, “allegedly into Aussies, Loonies (Canada), Scandies, Won?, Real? but above all pounds” according to Evans-Pritchard.
The end of the floor represents one of the more positive signs for the European project recently. If people holding Swiss Francs have started selling them in enough quantities that the SNB doesn’t have to do it themselves, then at least the currency markets think something good is about to happen in the rest of the Eurozone. Though there is now the risk that this plays even further into the ECB’s complacency.
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