Independence in research and monetary policy – a critical success factor for Switzerland

From snb.ch

It is a great honour and pleasure for me to speak to you on this year’s ETH Day. Many citizens may not know that the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and the Swiss National Bank (SNB) have a related ‘origin story’. The years after 1848 saw the founding of one important federal institution after another in the fledgling Swiss Confederation. And the question of where those institutions should be sited triggered a cantonal tug-of-war. The wrangling over the ETH and the SNB took a particularly long time to resolve. Indeed, in the case of the SNB, the situation was so delicate that, right up to the year ... (full story)