Ladies and gentlemen It is my pleasure to welcome you to the news conference of the Swiss National Bank. Our news conferences will now be held after every monetary policy assessment. The introductory remarks will be shorter overall. This will give us more time to take your questions afterwards. Monetary policy decision I will begin with our monetary policy decision. We have decided to tighten our monetary policy further and to raise the SNB policy rate by 0.75 percentage points to 0.5%. In doing so, we are countering the renewed rise in inflationary pressure and the spread of inflation to goods and services that have ... (full story)

Against the backdrop of current interest rate movements, I would like to give you a brief assessment of developments on the mortgage and real estate markets. Alongside other factors such as construction activity, income and demographics, interest rates have an impact on the real estate market and on demand for mortgages. In turn, mortgage and real estate markets play a key role for banks and financial stability. After a long period of extremely low interest rates, interest rate levels on the money and capital markets in Switzerland have risen substantially since the beginning of the year. As a consequence, interest ... (full story)

As Thomas Jordan has indicated, I will now discuss some important aspects of the implementation of our monetary policy in the money market. With today’s interest rate decision, we are bringing a period of a negative SNB policy rate to an end. To ensure that the secured short-term Swiss franc money market rates remain close to the SNB policy rate in a positive interest rate environment, we are adjusting our implementation approach. Our approach now consists of the following two elements. The first is a tiered remuneration of the sight deposits that banks and other financial market participants hold at the SNB. We ... (full story)