Perhaps it was just time to let the world know once again just how very neutral Switzerland is — a cold, existentialist shrug of ça m'est égal to the rest of the world’s financial markets.
But the Swiss National Bank may, if only briefly, have become the most important central bank in the world, when it announced on Thursday it was ditching the currency ceiling it had put in place in 2011 to protect itself from haven-seeking investors fleeing the eurozone sovereign crisis.
The surprise was the greater because for years, the central banks of major economies have tried as hard as they can to make it easy for investors to guess their next moves. Investors in turn have placed their bets as though they had access to the daily dream diaries of officials like Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi.
So this week, capital markets participants confidently set about their work with an eye on the potential storms brewing from next week’s European Central Bank meeting — though most seem convinced that quantitative easing is guaranteed — and the Greek elections.
The SNB’s move gave them a stern lesson: don't take anything for granted.
Some were quick to read the SNB’s move through their own prism. It must, they were sure, have sprung from a secret word breathed to its Alpine brother by the ECB about its intent to begin buying sovereign bonds.
But no proof of this has come to light, and it smacks of the kind of logic so often seen in financial markets, whose self-important participants think monetary policy is all about them.
QE may well be the ECB’s plan. Certainly, markets have already priced it in.
But as the SNB showed on Thursday, central banks are perfectly capable of being unpredictable. Hold on to your seats on Thursday next week.