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Switzerland Rejects US Claims

Switzerland Rejects US Claims
Switzerland Rejects US Claims

Switzerland is not manipulating its currency, Jorg Gasser, the country’s state secretary for international financial matters, told CNBC’s “Street Signs” on Tuesday. That followed Switzerland being named last week as one of six countries on the “monitoring list” in the US Treasury’s semi-annual currency report on potential foreign-exchange manipulators. Switzerland met two of the three criteria to be named a manipulator, both in the most recent report and the previous one in October: It runs a material current account surplus and it engages in persistent, one-sided intervention in foreign exchange markets. It did not meet the third criterion of running a bilateral trade surplus with the US of at least $20 billion. The US Treasury estimated that Switzerland’s central bank purchased a net $66 billion of foreign exchange in euros in 2016, with $20 billion purchased in June after the UK referendum to exit the eurozone. Gasser added, “There are some good explanations for that. Switzerland is not manipulating its own currency. It’s simply that the Swiss franc is grossly overvalued.”

 

 

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