The previous deputy, Martin Schlegel, will become president, and the experienced national banker Petra Tschudin will join the Governing Board: the SNB leadership is getting younger. But it stands for stability.
It was an election with a selection: the number of people who were considered as potential candidates for a seat on the Board of Directors of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and thus also for replacing the outgoing President Thomas Jordan was reportedly in the three-digit range.
Now, after four months of intensive discussions, the Federal Council has decided on two “homegrown” candidates. As expected, Thomas Jordan will be succeeded as National Bank President by his current deputy, Martin Schlegel. Antoine Martin, a native of western Switzerland who joined the SNB Board of Directors from the American central bank at the beginning of the year, will be his new deputy. The Federal Council has appointed Petra Tschudin, who was part of the extended Board of Directors and, with a five-year break from 2004, gained experience in various economics-related positions at the SNB.
Regulatory expertise required
The Federal Council and the Bank Council are thus sending an important signal of consistency. This was not entirely self-evident. In advance, external voices had been loudly complaining that the SNB’s culture needed to become more diverse. It needed more external input, which is why it would be best to elect an external woman with managerial experience in a bank to the Board of Directors or even make her its President.
But it is precisely the experiences that were made after Thomas Jordan was first elected to the SNB’s Executive Board in May 2007 that clearly illustrate what a seat on the three-member Executive Board demands. Jordan helped to overcome the financial crisis, including the rescue of UBS and the creation of the Stability Fund, the euro crisis with the introduction of the minimum exchange rate to the euro, its abolition, the foreign exchange market interventions against the strong franc, the pandemic with the emergency loans and the demise of Credit Suisse. This did not primarily require diversity, but a great deal of economic and regulatory expertise, good international networking, tact and the ability to communicate clearly to politicians and the public.
The SNB has proven to be a rock in the surf. It has not allowed itself to be distracted from its mandate of price stability and has therefore not followed every fashionable twitch. As a result, consumer prices in this country have only risen by eight percent since 2007. The economy has nevertheless grown considerably. Consumers in our neighboring countries can only dream of that.
This is due not least to the SNB’s highly technocratic culture, which has not allowed itself to be harnessed for all possible and impossible other projects.
Fending off political desires
By electing Martin Schlegel as the new President of the National Bank, who in many respects follows in the tradition of Thomas Jordan, and by completing the Board of Directors with Petra Tschudin, the Bank Council under the leadership of Barbara Janom Steiner and the Federal Council are committing themselves to this culture and at the same time to a generational change. Schlegel was born in 1976, Tschudin in 1975. Schlegel’s relatively young age is no disadvantage: Jordan was only one year older when he was elected President of the Board of Directors.
However, Jordan already had a little more experience in dealing with Bernese politics. In addition to continuing the SNB’s stability culture and modernizing some of the monetary policy processes and concepts, Schlegel’s biggest and most important challenge will be to defend the SNB’s independence.
The SNB is not there to meet the specific financial needs of the federal government and the cantons, nor to pursue an export promotion policy, nor to save the climate. It must remain a technocratic organization and should not be overloaded with political tasks and goals. The SNB’s track record in terms of stability policy in recent years has given it a high level of credibility among the general public and in politics. Today’s personnel decisions create a good basis for ensuring that this remains the case. And that is the most important thing.