Inflation in Switzerland

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The inflation problem has never caused fundamental difficulties in the sense of hyperinflation in Switzerland since the introduction of the Swiss franc on the occasion of the founding of the federal state in 1848 . So far, inflation has mainly reached a larger scale in the first half of the 1970s.

As far as the post-war period is concerned, in addition to the 1970s, Switzerland has increased inflation phases between 1980 and 1990 (price increase of 96 index points, measured on a base of 100 in 1955).

Between 1970 and 1975 the index rose 67 points (with a peak rate of 9 percent in 1973). The main cause was currency interventions by the Swiss National Bank (SNB), which tried to mitigate the consequences of a flight of international speculative capital into the hard currency franc - due to the dissolution of the Bretton Woods system - by selling the local currency and exchanging it for foreign currencies; namely, the upward pressure on the export economy was confronted with major pricing problems. The new Swiss franc money supply created by the National Bank's interventions flowed into the domestic economy, above all into the construction industry. Since a relatively restrictive foreign policy was applied in the country at the same time, the construction industry was unable to keep up with the booming construction demand with its labor supply: demand inflation arose, which was exacerbated by imported cost inflation due to the oil price crisis.

This inflation was combated primarily by the minimum reserve policy of the Swiss National Bank and countercyclical spending policies of the federal government, cantons and municipalities, which postponed investment projects that were not very urgent. In the shorter term also got credit ceilings used.

literature

  • Henner Kleinewefers, Regula Pfister: The Swiss National Economy , 1994.
  • Ernst Baltensperger : The monetary policy of Switzerland since the sixties (article), 2007 ( online ).
  • Egon Tuchtfeldt (Ed.): Swiss Economic Policy Between Yesterday and Tomorrow , 1976