By John Revill<\/p>\n
Bern, April 24 (Reuters) – Swiss National Bank Chairman Martin Schlegel defended the central \u200cbank’s investment approach on Friday, after campaigners \u200cfrom Minneapolis called on the central bank to offload its $1.1 billion \u200binvestment in Palantir Technologies.<\/p>\n
Schlegel said he could not comment on individual stocks but said the SNB’s massive foreign currency portfolio was designed to serve its \u200cmonetary policy.<\/p>\n
The bank’s investments \u2060must be available at all times and preserve their value over the long \u2060term, Schlegel said, while with equities the SNB followed a market-neutral approach.<\/p>\n
“We weight companies according to their \u200bmarket weight \u200bor market capitalization, in \u200border to cover the \u200cmarket as broadly as possible and also to diversify risks,” Schlegel said.<\/p>\n
Still, the SNB did exclude companies that systematically cause severe environmental damage, violate fundamental human rights or produce banned weapons, he added.<\/p>\n
“Naturally, \u200cwe work with external specialists \u200bwho carry out the screening \u200bfor us and \u200balso make the corresponding assessments,” Schlegel said.<\/p>\n
“I \u200cbelieve this process is very \u200brobust,” he \u200bsaid, adding the situation with companies was not always clear in one direction or the \u200bother.<\/p>\n
“There are shades \u200cof grey, and there are even other \u200bcolours as well,” Schlegel said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by John Revill, \u200bEditing by Miranda Murray)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By John Revill Bern, April 24 (Reuters) – Swiss National Bank Chairman Martin Schlegel defended the central \u200cbank’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56529,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[30839,30809,14614,41,1364,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-56528","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-switzerland","8":"tag-investment-approach","9":"tag-martin-schlegel","10":"tag-snb","11":"tag-swiss","12":"tag-swiss-national-bank","13":"tag-switzerland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116477692866731633","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56528","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=56528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56528\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}