AFP, in its January 6, 2014 article, reports that Swiss central bank hard was hit by gold price fall.
Extract :
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Switzerland's
central bank said Monday it lost billions in 2013 as gold prices plunged and
therefore could not pay dividends to the Swiss cantons for the first time in more
than a century.
The Swiss
National Bank (SNB) has been dishing out dividends to the Swiss cantons ever
since its creation in 1907, and to the Swiss Confederation since 1991.
But on Monday
the bank said neither would receive handouts this year, after provisional
figures showed it would be reporting a loss of 9.0 billion Swiss francs ($9.9
billion, 7.3 billion euros) for 2013.
It had lost
far more on the value of its gold holdings, which shed 15 billion francs
during a year when the price for the precious metal dropped by 28 percent.
That deep loss
was offset though by gains of 3.0 billion Swiss francs on the bank's foreign
currency positions, and another increase of 3.0 billion on a stabilisation fund it put in place in 2008 to save
Switzerland's largest bank, UBS, from collapse.
The loss does
not come as much of a surprise since SNB already said in October that the
value of its gold holdings had shrunk by 10.7 billion francs during the first
nine months of the year.
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Read the rest of the article at
AFP
