By John Revill<\/p>\n
BERN, April 24 (Reuters) – The Middle East conflict will lead to slower economic growth and higher inflation in Switzerland, \u200cbut the Swiss National Bank has unrestricted scope to target price \u200cstability, SNB Chairman Martin Schlegel said on Friday.<\/p>\n
The war had made the global economic situation “very \u200buncertain”, Schlegel told the SNB’s annual general meeting.<\/p>\n
The outlook for inflation and the economy in Switzerland had also become much more unclear, he added.<\/p>\n
“Growth could be rather subdued in the short term, even though we expect an upturn \u200cto some extent in \u2060the medium term. In the coming quarters, higher energy prices will lift inflation further in Switzerland,” Schlegel said in \u2060Bern.<\/p>\n
Swiss inflation has recently tended towards the bottom end of the SNB’s 0-2% target range, which it calls price stability.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile upward pressure on the Swiss franc \u200bhas increased, \u200bwith investors seeking safe havens, which \u200bthreatened to push inflation lower \u200cby making imports cheaper, Schlegel said.<\/p>\n
The SNB has kept its interest rate locked at 0%, the lowest among major central banks, and last month said it had increased its readiness to intervene in foreign currency markets to cap a too rapid or excessive rise in the franc.<\/p>\n
Economists at UBS \u200cestimate the SNB increased its foreign policy \u200bpurchases to 2.5 billion francs in March, a \u200bbig increase from recent months, \u200bbut still modest compared with interventions during the Covid \u200cpandemic in 2020.<\/p>\n
The SNB would not \u200bhesitate to act \u200bto keep inflation on target, Schlegel said, and adjust monetary policy if necessary.<\/p>\n
“We have unrestricted room for manoeuvre with regard to the SNB \u200bpolicy rate and foreign \u200cexchange market interventions,” he said, reiterating that the SNB was \u200bmore willing to buy foreign currencies to weaken the franc.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bJohn Revill, editing by Dave Graham)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By John Revill BERN, April 24 (Reuters) – The Middle East conflict will lead to slower economic growth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[113,30809,30810,14614,470,1364,17],"class_list":["post-54869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-switzerland","tag-inflation","tag-martin-schlegel","tag-price-stability","tag-snb","tag-swiss-franc","tag-swiss-national-bank","tag-switzerland"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116458810475838876","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54869","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=54869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}