By John Revill<\/p>\n
ZURICH, March 2 (Reuters) – The Swiss National Bank said on Monday it was more willing to intervene in foreign currency markets after the \u200cconflict in the Middle East pushed the Swiss franc to its highest level \u200cagainst the euro in more than a decade.<\/p>\n
The euro dropped to 0.9037 francs in early trading, its lowest \u200blevel since the Franc Shock of January 2015, as investors sought safe havens.<\/p>\n
The development prompted the SNB to make a rare verbal intervention, signalling its intention to check the increase of the franc, whose rise could push inflation negative and hurt Swiss exporters.<\/p>\n
“In view of international \u200cdevelopments, our willingness to intervene in \u2060the foreign exchange market has increased,” the central bank said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“We are prepared to intervene in the foreign exchange market to \u2060counter a rapid and excessive appreciation of the Swiss franc, which jeopardises price stability in Switzerland,” the SNB said.<\/p>\n
The last time the SNB made such a statement was in 2016, after \u200bBritain’s vote \u200bto leave the European Union triggered a spike \u200bin the franc.<\/p>\n
Analysts said they expected \u200cthe SNB to sell francs to slow the currency’s appreciation, but would not take interest rates below the current 0% level.<\/p>\n
“We could expect some interventions by the SNB to slow this movement, but we don’t see the SNB defending a certain level and prevent the franc going below that,” said UBS economist Alessandro Bee.<\/p>\n
“They will want to take some \u200cmomentum out of the move, but won’t defend \u200bthe 0.90 level, for example, because these strong inflows \u200binto the franc could reverse very \u200bquickly.”<\/p>\n
Bee said it was unclear how long the situation would last, so \u200cit did not make sense to take \u200bSwiss interest rates negative \u200bor other emergency measures.<\/p>\n
“That would only be appropriate if there were long-term problems like a slowdown in the global economy or other central banks were cutting \u200brates,” Bee said.<\/p>\n
“This spike in \u200cthe franc is not a structural problem in the euro zone like what \u200bhappened in 2011. It\u2019s down to geopolitics and risk aversion.”<\/p>\n
(Reporting by John Revill;Editing \u200bby Ludwig Burger, Muralikumar Anantharaman and Neil Fullick)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By John Revill ZURICH, March 2 (Reuters) – The Swiss National Bank said on Monday it was more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22822,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[14679,2560,14680,14614,41,470,1364,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-22821","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-switzerland","8":"tag-conflict-in-the-middle-east","9":"tag-currency-markets","10":"tag-francs","11":"tag-snb","12":"tag-swiss","13":"tag-swiss-franc","14":"tag-swiss-national-bank","15":"tag-switzerland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}