Weder di Mauro tipped for SNB
Beatrice Weder di Mauro, member of Germany’s council of economic experts, has emerged as a possible candidate to join the board of the Swiss National Bank, following the resignation of Philipp Hildebrand .
In Davos, Switzerland, today, she refused to comment on rumours about her future, reports Bloomberg. Read more
How does Mr Hildebrand’s pay compare?
Controversy over Philipp Hildebrand continues to rage. This from the FT’s Haig Simonian:
The Swiss National Bank will pay its former chairman a full year’s salary of about SFr900,000 ($942,000), in spite of his stepping down voluntarily in only the second week of the year.
The bank said Philipp Hildebrand’s contract entitled him to 12 months’ pay. The first six months covered his notice period, with the remainder compensating him for a clause in his contract that prevents him from working for another bank until next January.
The pay-off will stoke a political storm in Switzerland over Mr Hildebrand’s departure following revelations of currency transactions by his wife, and is likely to fuel the wider debate in Europe over bankers’ remuneration.
At Sfr900,000, Mr Hildebrand’s salary is high for the head of a central bank. The terms of his severance package are also generous. Read more
Lessons from Mr Hildebrand’s resignation
Philipp Hildebrand has quit as chair of the Swiss National Bank less than three weeks after government and central bank investigations cleared him of any wrongdoing.
Knowing what we now know, it does not look as though either investigation was tough enough. And neither, as the central bank and Mr Hildebrand have already acknowledged, were the rules on senior officials’ financial dealings.
Both factors have damaged the credibility of the central bank, which Mr Hildebrand noted in his parting remarks is its greatest asset.
To rectify that, the onus should fall on central bankers in Switzerland and elsewhere to show why, when making investment decisions, they have opted for anything other than handing over the management of all of their assets to an outside party. Read more
How did Hildebrand respond?
There were four issues for Swiss National Bank chairman Philipp Hildebrand to address in his appearance before the media today:
1. Whether he will resign.
2. His role in, and opinion of, his wife’s dollar trades.
3. The political dimension of the scandal.
4. His view on secrecy surrounding the SNB’s code of conduct, and whether the code was tough enough.
So how did he respond? Read more
Questions for Mr Hildebrand
Philipp Hildebrand. Image by Getty.
The Swiss National Bank’s beleaguered chairman Philipp Hildebrand will meet the press at 4pm local time (3pm GMT) today for a grilling over his wife’s foreign-exchange trades.
Here are some of the questions that need answering. Read more
The Hildebrands and SNB secrecy
UPDATE: 14.43 The Swiss National Bank has now published its code of conduct on insider trading for members of its governing board. Money Supply 1 SNB secrecy 0.
The Swiss National Bank’s chairman Philipp Hildebrand has found himself caught up in an insider trading scandal involving his wife’s decision to swap dollars for francs weeks before the central bank introduced its euro cap in early September. A small amount of dollars were also bought through his daughter’s account.
A central bank investigation has cleared the Hildebrands of any wrongdoing. And that the purchases have attracted so much attention no doubt owes much to the political heat the central bank has found itself under in recent years.
The purchases, revealed through private information passed to politician and frequent SNB critic Christoph Blocher, have also damaged Switzerland’s prized reputation for banking secrecy. Doing its part to repair the country’s reputation for opacity, the SNB has refused to release its policy to prevent insider trading by its employees.
But regardless of Mr Hildebrand’s innocence, as a public institution, the Swiss central bank’s stance is misguided. Read more
SNB gets tough with the cantons
The Swiss National Bank’s forays into the foreign exchange markets have – along with the appreciation of the franc – led to spectacular losses, which in turn have provoked the ire of some of the country’s politicians.
One of the reasons why is that the central bank has traditionally paid out Sfr2.5bn each year to the Swiss confederation and the country’s cantons, which own the majority of the SNB.
The losses have thrown that into doubt. With the central bank announcing a paper loss of Sfr10.8bn for the first half of 2011, will it pay out? The message from Thomas Jordan, the SNB’s vice chair, today: don’t count on it. Read more
The SNB is right to peg
It was a while coming, but the Swiss National Bank has finally done what was needed for it to have a decent chance of halting the franc’s appreciation.
The SNB on Tuesday said it would set a minimum exchange rate of Sfr1.20 to the euro. In order to maintain the peg, it is prepared to buy foreign currency “in unlimited quantities”. Though this could well result in steep paper losses – and so anger its owners, the SNB is right to act.
There are two reasons why. Read more
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Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
