By John Revell
ZURICH (Reuters) – The Swiss National Bank (SNB) is against buying and holding bitcoin as a reserve currency, the central bank’s chairman, Thomas Jordan, said at the central bank’s annual general meeting on Friday.
“Buying bitcoin is not a problem for us, we can do it directly or buy bitcoin-based investment products,” Jordan said. “We can organize the technical and operational conditions relatively quickly, when we are convinced that we should have bitcoin on our balance sheet.”
“But from the current perspective, we do not believe that bitcoin meets the reserve currency requirements, which is why so far we have decided not to have bitcoin on our balance sheet,” he added.
The bank, which has $937 billion in foreign currency investments, has reduced investment in energy and fossil fuel companies from 10% of its holdings to about 3% to 4%, President Jordan said.
“It doesn’t make sense for us to sell all our shares, they would be bought by someone else. The important thing is that the economy can transform … to produce less CO2 emissions,” Jordan told AGM.
The SNB has already ruled out investing in companies primarily involved in coal mining, he added, but it cannot rule out investments in oil and gas overnight, he said.
