Economics
Thank the Central Bank: Chances of a Swiss Recession Just Jumped
It's no Russia (with a 99% likelihood of contracting) but it still has economists worried
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The Swiss National Bank's decision on Jan. 15 to scrap its three-year cap on the franc shocked a lot of people.
That includes economists surveyed by Bloomberg, who dove back into their spreadsheets to account for this new world order. As recently as December, they saw only a 9 percent risk of the Swiss economy slipping into a recession. The odds jumped to 40 percent last week, a more-than four-fold increase (see the black line shoot up in the chart below). Four of 10 economists, in fact, predicted a recession — defined as two consecutive quarters of contraction — in 2015.