🔴Efforts are underway in Switzerland to amend the Swiss Federal Constitution to mandate the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to hold Bitcoin alongside gold as part of its monetary reserves. This ground breaking initiative, officially registered in the Federal Gazette on December 31, 2024, seeks to position Switzerland at the forefront of global Bitcoin adoption ‼️ 👉 The Proposal and Its Architects The initiative, titled “For a financially sound, sovereign, and responsible Switzerland,” was spearheaded by Giw Zanganeh, Tether’s Vice President of Energy and Mining, alongside Yves Bennaïm, founder of the Swiss Bitcoin nonprofit think tank 2B4CH. Eight additional Bitcoin advocates collaborated on the proposal, which requires 100,000 signatures by June 30, 2026, to trigger a national referendum. This threshold represents roughly 1.12% of Switzerland’s population of 8.92 million. 👉 If successful, the proposed amendment would revise Article 99 Paragraph 3 of the Swiss Federal Constitution to state: “The National Bank builds up sufficient monetary reserves from its own earnings; part of these reserves are made up of gold and Bitcoin.” 🚨 The official PDFs (and instructions) are here 👇 : if you are Swiss you can sign and send it back to BITCOIN VOLKSINITIATIVE, POSTFACH 521, 6440 BRUNNEN

in the current context of weak inflation, upward pressures on the Swiss franc and worrying dynamics in neighboring European countries. The 50bp rate cut is half-a-surprise for financial markets, that were not fully convinced of the possibility of such large movement and were rather pricing a 25bp rate cut. swiss franc initially weakened 0.5% vs the Euro. But it is already back to 0.93. OUR TAKE (based on our Chief Economist Adrien Pichoud views) 👉 Swiss CPI inflation has slipped below 1% in the 4th quarter of 2024 (+0.7% in November) and it is expected to slow further in 2025. The SNB expects inflation to hover just above zero (+0.2%/+0.3%) for most of next year before picking up slightly as 2026 draws near. By averaging +0.3% in 2025, the inflation rate would be at the very bottom of the 0-to-2% range that the SNB targets. 👉 As the Swiss economy faces headwinds from the strength of the Swiss franc and the weakness of economic activity in Germany and most other European economies, monetary policy has no reason to be restrictive and had to be adjusted. After today’s rate cut, the monetary policy stance is about neutral (with a real short-term rate close to 0%). 👉 Looking ahead, more rate cuts are to be expected in 2025. We expect the CHF short-term rate to be lowered to 0.0% by June next year, with 25bp rate cuts at the March and June meetings. 👉 Will Switzerland move back to NEGATIVE RATES? This is not our scenario at this stage, even if it wasn’t ruled out by Mr Schlegel recently. Potential undue upward pressures on the CHF will then likely be addressed with interventions on the FX market and a possible expansion of the SNB’s balance sheet size. It would require a significant deterioration in global growth and inflation dynamics next year for the SNB to be pushed back into negative interest rate policies. Source chart: Bloomberg

[Dennis Porter] - Bitcoin Archive