That’s the new rate of the SNB and the highlight of the day!
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Nothing really changes with this move
I’d say it signals their intent. The CHF is becoming stronger, which lowers importing costs but makes exports less competitive so they’re willing to make things a bit harder for the economy in order to fight inflation.
They’ve also signaled that they stand ready to buy or sell assets if the forex situation requires it and they own a significant amount of stocks. Them unwinding some of them could have an effect.
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Plus it was a big kick in the ECB’s butt 
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I didn’t drink my coffe yet…though… I am not sure what is happening/going to happen.
eli5?
They make cheaper to store money in CHF. So it means more people might want to store their money here, thus making the CHF more expensive. I get the FX rate part, but for the inflation? It just means less people will invest in wrong stocks and put their money in chf deposits. How that helps the inflation? Is it because most of the stuff is being bought abroad?
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It cools down the economy (money circulates less and is less readily available).
The impact on FX is not the primary driver here (and actually it’s the SNB capitulating in keeping CHF competitive against EUR). They felt like they couldn’t wait for the ECB to go first (but I guess they would have preferred that to avoid hurting industries/exports).
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I guess it will also push down prices for energy, which for most people unfortunately means fossil fuels. I also guess that it is not such an important contribution to the inflation, but probably the most visible/medialized one.
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Personally I think the current inflation is more a result of Covid restrictions (mostly in China) and the impact on the supply chains as well as the rise of oil and gas price as a result of the Ukrainian conflict. Therefore, I would assume that the impact on inflation of the measurement from SNB is rather small.
Well we will see, however I fear that we will not take our lessons. In my opinion one of the most important lessons would be to diversify our supply chain away from China. It’s just insane to see how dependent we all are from China and that will not change with some movement in our monetary policy.
I think that is the reason yes. Oil, gas and other commoditiers are traded in USD and EUR are more expensive in these currency. With a stronger CHF compared to USD and EUR, the EUR and USD inflation is partially compensated with the stronger CHF. So less inflation in CHF terms.
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