SNB’s New Female Rate Setter Unlikely to Challenge Status Quo

(Bloomberg) — She may only be the second woman to ever sit on the Swiss National Bank’s rate-setting board, but in most other respects, Petra Tschudin is cut from the same cloth as her colleagues.

Tschudin, 48, was appointed on Wednesday to fill the gap on the three-member board when SNB President Thomas Jordan leaves at the end of September. Widely seen as one of his protégés, she will take over the department in charge of market operations.

The promotion is the culmination of a central-bank career that started 20 years ago, though — unlike other top staffers — she left the SNB for an extended period of time in between. 

From 2009 to 2011, she worked as an economist at the Bank for International Settlements, and after that she taught at Trinity College in Dublin until 2014. 

Currently she is a deputy to the board, who steps in if a rate-setter gets sick or resigns without a successor being appointed. Already in her previous post — deputy head of the economic affairs division — Tschudin was involved in the calculations behind SNB rate decisions.

Last year, together with the institution’s chief economist Carlos Lenz, she published an essay on the review of the central bank’s monetary policy approach, concluding that it is “proving successful also in difficult times.”

The “slightly amended and otherwise unchanged concept allows the SNB to pursue a credible monetary policy geared toward price stability now and in the future,” they said.

In her future department, Tschudin — who holds a doctorate from the University of Basel — will oversee money markets and the foreign exchange reserves that have ballooned the SNB’s balance sheet. She’ll also be in charge of the central bank’s digital currency experiments.

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