“You can’t just press a button and everything goes back to the way it was before,” says Vice-President Fritz Zurbrügg.
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The pace of economic recovery in Switzerland will not be as fast as expected, warned the vice-president of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) Fritz Zurbrügg in an interview with the newspaper Schweiz am Wochenende to be published on Sunday.
“You can’t just press a button and everything goes back to the way it was before,” Zurbrügg told the Sunday newspaper. While some economists have suggested a rapid V-shaped rebound, the recovery may be less vigorous.
The head of the broadcaster listed falling demand, supply problems, unemployment and business and consumer uncertainty as a brake on the economic rebound.
While several economists have announced that they expect growth to fall from 5% to 7% this year, followed by a recovery of 5% in 2021, Fritz Zurbrügg said that these projections were “realistic”, but that the uncertainties remained “very high”.
In this context of crisis, the SNB still has “room for maneuver in terms of balance sheet and key rates” to react, he added. The Covid-19 pandemic made “rapid normalization” of the monetary policy conducted by the Swiss central bank even more unrealistic, whose key rates have been in negative territory for several years.
Despite this situation, the current crisis should not further increase the risks of overheating on the property market, boosted for years by low financing costs.
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