The federal guarantees for the COVID-19 loans and the liquidity provided at favourable conditions by the SNB have contributed towards Switzerland being able to avoid a credit crunch in the past few months. Page 3/4  Zurich, 17 December 2020 Thomas Jordan  News conference  It will take some time yet before the economy recovers, and uncertainty will remain high for the time being. We will therefore be seeking to do our utmost with our monetary policy to ensure price stability and to contribute to the economic recovery. Climate change and the SNB  I would now like to talk about the significance of climate change for the SNB. We have been working intensively on this topic for some time now. We want to properly assess possible consequences of climate change for the economy, for financial stability, and for the management of our foreign exchange reserves in order to ensure that we can fulfil our statutory mandate at all times. To this end, we also collaborate with other central banks, in particular in the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), and we work together closely with FINMA. As regards monetary policy, we are continuously deepening our analysis into how climate change could affect economic growth and inflation. The dialogue with other central banks is particularly important in this area. When it comes to financial stability, the SNB focuses its efforts on determining the impact of climate risks on the stability of the Swiss banking system.
In so doing, we take the overall exchange rate situation into consideration. Furthermore, we are supplying generous amounts of liquidity to the banking system via the SNB COVID-19 refinancing facility (CRF). The SNB’s expansionary monetary policy provides favourable financing conditions, counters upward pressure on the Swiss franc, and contributes to an appropriate supply of credit and liquidity to the economy. Page 1/4  Zurich, 17 December 2020 Thomas Jordan  News conference  Inflation forecast  In the current situation, the inflation outlook remains subject to high uncertainty. The new conditional inflation forecast through to the end of 2021 is slightly lower than in September. This is primarily due to the renewed deterioration in the economic situation as a result of the second wave of the pandemic. In the longer term, the inflation forecast is unchanged from September. The forecast for 2020 is negative (−0.7%). The inflation rate is likely to be higher again next year (0.0%) and slightly positive in 2022 (0.2%). The conditional inflation forecast is based on the assumption that the SNB policy rate remains at −0.75% over the entire forecast horizon. The long-term inflation expectations are well anchored and stand at around 1%. Global economic outlook  The coronavirus pandemic and the measures implemented to contain it led to a historic downturn in the global economy in the first half of 2020. With the decline in new infections and the easing of the containment measures in the summer months, economic activity increasingly resumed.