The negative result of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) announced on Monday means that no profit will be redistributed to the Confederation and the cantons. After the flight of this windfall, we must review the principles of monetary policy, argued the economist Paul Dembinski in the 7:30 p.m. of the RTS.
The announcement of the 132 billion loss is not a surprise to anyone, because the poor results had been known for months. But some French-speaking cantons had nevertheless budgeted for these revenues. Bern counted on 320 million, Vaud on 187.6 million and Valais on 107.3 million francs. For the Jura, it is 22.8 million who fly away, a real tile for a canton already in deficit and in full savings program.
>> Details on the SNB loss announcement: The SNB confirms its negative result of around 132 billion francs
Some cantons have planned millions in income from the SNB in their budget. [RTS]Other cantons have been more forward-looking. This is the case of Neuchâtel, which had budgeted only a small part of the windfall, ie 27 million francs. Geneva, for its part, removed the sum at the last minute from its budget. As for that of Freiburg, the money of the SNB was purely and simply not registered there.
The majority of the cantons say they can draw on their economic reserves and absorb this shortfall this year. Questioned in the 7:30 p.m., the director of the Observatory of Finance and professor at the University of Friborg Paul Dembinski considers for his part that it is necessary to review some habits in public finances.
“Revisit expectations and hopes”
“We budget [avec les bénéfices de la BNS] because it had been working for ten years. We said to ourselves that the eleventh year, it would still work”. But the expert recalls that before 2011, the SNB distributed only one billion to the cantons, an amount increased thanks to the “phenomenal results” of the last decade.
“We raised the expectations to six [milliards]. Some said that they should be increased to ten or twenty (…). I believe that today, we are going to review expectations and hopes. And we will above all review the principles of monetary policy”, launches the economist.
>> Listen to the full interview with Paul Dembinski:
The SNB is not quite a company like the others, but it remains a public limited company (SA), notes the specialist in finance. “If the equity of an SA goes from 200 to 60, we still have questions,” he asserts, explaining that this is what happened this year with the SNB… in terms of billion. “We are, somewhere, close to a breaking point,” he adds.
He thus evokes the hypothesis of a disappearance of the SNB’s own funds which would require recapitalisation. “Some may be called upon to pay, including the Confederation and perhaps, to some extent, the cantons,” he says. In this case, the latter would therefore be doubly losers in the face of the difficulties of the SNB.
>> Also listen to the interview with Rosalie Beuret Siess, Jura Minister in charge of Finance, in Forum on Monday evening:
Interview by Philippe Revaz
Adaptation web: ami
Sujet TV: dg, nb, ok
