In 2017, the public sector held 76.36% of the shares of the National Bank, while private owners represented 23.64%. The SNB has a board of directors consisting of three people, each of whom is responsible for a specific division within the bank. They are responsible for fulfilling and maintaining the central bank's price stability mandate taking into account economic circumstances. The limit of the inflation price is not an absolute number but a band with higher and lower levels. The central bank uses policy tools such as interest rate hikes and cuts to achieve the price growth target, whether with hawkish (aggressive hard-hitting) policies or accommodating by SNB officials. SO NOT TO FORGET, when the Eurozone debt crisis began in 2011, with the first turmoil in Greece also in 2011, institutional financial operators started buying the Swiss franc as an alternative to the euro. However, as Switzerland is an export-driven economy, the stronger franc has been an obstacle for economic growth. It also undermined the effort to ban deflation-era deflation. To counter this, the SNB decided in 2011 to put a minimum EUR / CHF ratio of 1.20. So if the EUR / CHF approached to fall below this exchange rate, the bank would have weakened the Swiss unit by selling it on the open market. This clearing process lasted until early 2015. Suddenly on January 15, 2015, despite statements by SNB officials, confirming their commitment to the EUR / CHF balance plan at 1.20, communicated a few days earlier, the central bank has abandoned monetary policy without warning.
The consequence in that January 15, 2015 was the Swiss franc appreciated with an astronomical + 30% on the euro, causing chaos in all currency relationships. By gradually lowering interest rates after the Great Recession to negative levels, the Swiss National Bank has encouraged the use of a speculative strategy called the carry trade. This allows investors using the cheap borrowed franc to buy higher yielding assets; allowing them to earn the interest rate differential as income. When financial markets are relatively bullish, investors invest in yields compared to security or protection, the increase in demand for higher yielding financial instruments tends to produce a free increase in their prices. Such market conditions are typically characterized by an increase in equity markets. However, an adverse turnaround in market sentiment that shifts investor interest to capital preservation may put this dynamic backwards. Investors who have purchased riskier assets with borrowed francs exit these positions and buy back the Swiss unit to hedge the loans, bringing the currency higher. What it often produces in practice is an inverse relationship between the Swiss franc and "risky" assets, ie those with relatively higher rates of return than safer alternatives (a common example of the trade-off between "risky" assets and "safe" assets is between stocks and bonds, respectively).