Swiss Gold No – Repatriation, Demand from Russia, India and China More Important

By Ronan Manly

Introduction
Switzerland’s ‘Save our Swiss Gold’ referendum was convincingly rejected yesterday by the Swiss electorate following an aggressive anti-gold campaign in recent weeks that had been closely watched both in Switzerland and abroad.

Unusually, it involved the Swiss National Bank (SNB) very actively, and ultimately successfully, trying to convince the electorate along with the main political parties to return a ‘no’ vote.

The initiative had proposed a series of measures which would have obliged the SNB to hold a minimum of 20% of its reserves in gold, prevent the SNB from selling any gold, and force the SNB to repatriate that portion of its gold reserves that are currently stored abroad and to store gold in Switzerland.

The referendum campaign had evolved out of a popular initiative which had initially collected over 100,000 signatures between 2011 and 2013. Under Swiss law, this allowed the motion to go forward as an official referendum, even though the Swiss government, Swiss parliament and Swiss National Bank had all come out in opposition to the Gold Initiative. In rejecting the referendum, the Swiss People voted 77.3% against, versus 22.7% for. Voters in all 23 of Switzerland’s cantons rejected the initiative in what was an unfortunate defeat for the initiative’s organisers. In most cantons, the results showed a three to one ratio in opposition to the initiative, and even a four to one ratio in a few cantons.