News in Brief

Swiss Could Vote on Cash Guarantees

Swiss citizens are likely to vote in a future referendum on whether to enshrine in the constitution the availability of cash, after the launch of an initiative to pre-emptively guard against digital money.

In order for an initiative of the people to go to a national plebiscite it needs 100,000 signatures within 18 months. The group behind the initiative, Mouvement libertaire Suisse (the Swiss Freedom Movement), sees electronic transactions as a risk to freedom because they make surveillance easier, and claims it has already collected 157,000 signatures since launching the campaign at the start of February.

Neither the government nor the Swiss National Bank have voiced an intention to abolish cash. Even so, the initiative highlights how emotive the issue of physical money is in Switzerland. Every inhabitant holds the equivalent of $11,824 in cash, the most in all countries where the Bank for International Settlements collates data.