The sovereign money initiative will be submitted to the Swiss people in 2018. This paper reviews the arguments behind the initiative and discusses its potential impact. I argue that several arguments are inconsistent with empirical evidence or with economic logic. In particular, controlling...

This paper studies the transmission of changes in short-term interest rates to longer-term government bond yields when interest rates are at very low levels or negative. We focus on Switzerland, where short-term interest rates have been at zero since late 2008 and negative since the beginning of...

After the switch to a floating exchange rate in 1973, the Swiss National Bank at first adopted annual monetary targets and in the 1990s shifted to a medium-term targeting strategy. In this paper I review the SNB’s internal policy analysis, an aspect of Swiss monetary targeting that has...

Repurchase agreements (repos) are secured money market transactions. The cash taker provides collateral in the form of securities and in return receives money from the cash provider. To ensure the continuous covering of the cash amount, the definition of eligible collateral, its handling and...

Several empirical studies have suggested that the Bundesbank has pursued inflation targets rather than monetary targets. We find that, in the period from 1979 III to 1998 IV, changes in adjusted monetary base growth reacted negatively and significantly to deviations from target monetary...