Yahoo Finance Price Chaos As Swiss Peg To Euro Is Pulled
At first blush, it isn’t immediately obvious why anyone in this country should care about the Swiss National Bank abandoning pegging the value of the country’s currency to that of the euro.
A little alpine country decides to let its currency rise - so what?
It does matter, though. For a start, look at the foreign exchange markets today. The Swiss franc has rocketed in value by some 30% against the euro.
As London is the world’s biggest foreign exchange market, there will be many happy traders around the City and Canary Wharf.
A rise of this magnitude means lots of business for them.
On the downside, anyone about to go on a skiing holiday in Switzerland will find their gluhwein and raclette costing substantially more than this time on Wednesday. The ‘Swissie’, as traders call it, has also risen against sterling.
But there are other deeper and more profound reasons why we should care.
This is the Swiss National Bank signalling, as clearly as it can, that it is braced for full-blown quantitative easing from the European Central Bank.
The ECB will shortly spend hundreds of billions on an attempt to boost demand in the eurozone, pushing the value of the single currency sharply lower in the process. If you were the SNB, you would not want to be standing in the way of that.
Central banks that try to buck the market generally come off worse, as the Bank of England and Norman Lamont, the then Chancellor, discovered on 16 September 1992 when speculators like George Soros helped blow sterling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.
Full-blown QE in the eurozone will have huge knock-on effects for Britain. If it helps boost activity in the Eurozone, Britain’s biggest trading partner, it should boost UK economic growth.
On the other hand, it will probably send the euro lower against sterling - good news for British tourists visiting the euro area this summer, but not so good for British exporters trying to sell goods and services into the eurozone.
The impact will also be felt in other ways. In eastern Europe, for example, many people in countries like Poland and the Czech Republic have mortgages denominated in Swiss francs.
Plenty may now find their mortgages have become unaffordable. Watch out for the impact in Hungary, in particular, where Victor Orban, the country’s hard-right prime minister, has previously exploited unhappiness among homeowners.
This move will also wound many Swiss companies. The task of industrial giants like Sulzer, Landis + Gyr, Swatch and ABB (NYSE: ABB - news) has now become harder as they contend with a pricier currency.
On the whole, though, this is good news. The SNB’s policy had created all kinds of bubbles in assets like Swiss housing.
Far better to let markets allocate capital for themselves than try to do it for them. Who knows, some of the capital freed by this move may even now find its way over to Britain.
