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The National Bank does not want any restrictions and would like to continue investing money where it deems it sensible.
Pension plans like AHV and pension funds should no longer invest in arms companies. That is what the popular initiative wants, which will be voted on in Switzerland at the end of November. The Swiss National Bank would also be affected. He doesn’t like it at all.
Actions of arms companies
The National Bank has great fortunes. It has grown to more than 900 billion francs after repeatedly buying currencies like euros and dollars to weaken the franc. This size of wealth has monetary policy reasons. “You could say it is a by-product of our monetary policy,” says Thomas Moser, deputy member of the board of directors of the National Bank.
Moser works in the department that invests this money in global financial markets and deliberately distributes it among a wide variety of securities. At times, the National Bank also buys shares in arms companies.
“No product like another”
For example, it took a stake in Radeon Technologies, an American rocket manufacturer, and in the American arms manufacturer General Dynamics. If the National Bank said yes to the war settlement initiative, it would have to sell the shares of more than 300 companies. That would affect about two percent of your total assets.
Gun Stocks Out of Portfolio – This is exactly what the initiative aims to do. «War material is not a product like the others. It is made to harm and kill people, ”says Nadia Kuhn of the group for a Switzerland without a GSoA army. It is wrong for the National Bank to invest the national wealth in arms manufacturers.
The Swiss National Bank can be understood in a very broad sense as belonging to the Swiss population. “Therefore, it is actually quite clear to us that our assets should not be invested in war material. So that it does not harm people. “
“At the service of monetary policy”
Thomas Moser, from the National Bank, on the other hand, sees the initiative as a restriction on work, because the arms industry is one branch among many others. “It is not our job to favor or disadvantage any economic sector, but our objective is to invest these investments in the service of monetary policy in a broad and neutral way, without influencing individual sectors or companies,” he says.
The National Bank does not want to be influenced by this work. Therefore, it is against the initiative of war agreements. However, it is no longer investing in companies that produce prohibited weapons such as cluster munitions or chemical warfare agents.
