Citigroup Says Swiss Gold Reserves Vote Makes No Sense
This article is for subscribers only.
The initiative requiring the Swiss National Bank to hold a fixed portion of its assets in gold makes no sense, according to Citigroup Inc., which said the metal was the equivalent of the virtual currency bitcoin.
“There is no economic or financial case for a central bank to hold any single commodity, even if this commodity had intrinsic value,” Willem Buiter, the bank’s chief economist and a former Bank of England policy maker, wrote in a report dated yesterday. “Forbidding a central bank from ever selling any gold it owns reduces the value of those gold holdings to zero.”