Swiss National Bank introduces negative interest rates

Taking a leaf out of Mario Draghi’s book when the ECB reduced their Deposit Facility Rate to negative 0.10% on 5th June 2014, the Swiss National Bank has just done the same on sight deposit account balances, with a rather aggressive negative 0.25%.

”
Negative interest is charged on sight deposit account balances (cf. art. 2.1.1, Terms of Business) denominated in Swiss francs, provided that the account holder is a bank, securities dealer, cash processing facility, clearing and settlement organisation, mortgage bond institution, insurance company, international organisation or central bank.

As a rule, negative interest is not charged on balances of other holders of sight deposit accounts denominated in Swiss francs (in particular the Confederation and associated enterprises as well as domestic authorities). The SNB will monitor developments in the sight deposit account balances of these account holders. It reserves the right to impose negative interest on additional account holders.
“

Full press release at
http://www.snb.ch/en/ifor/media/id/media_releases
http://www.snb.ch/en/mmr/reference/pre_20141218/source/pre_20141218.en.pdf

Link for archival purposes.
http://www.mediafire.com/view/i4wiuhd1adr64gg/pre_20141218.en.pdf

Considering the SNB previously intervened by selling CHF, this way seems a lot easier.

Effects as of GMT 0800hrs so far look like this.

EURCHF 1-hour bars

EURCHF 1-minute bars

 Likely precipitated by a flight to safety by the Russian Ruble rout.

USDRUB 1-hour bars

Which was preceded by a collapse in oil prices.

Brent Crude Oil daily bars

While all of this is painfully obvious as it is in our collective consciousness, I thought it useful to post it for posterity as I’m sure I’ll forget about it 16 years later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Russian_financial_crisis