They also have the negative interest rate option for foreign depositors, a tax on currency transactions etc to try and control capital flows.

No comment on effectiveness though.

Oh well the SNB kept interest rates constant today & did not increase then as forecast by UBS.
The announcement caused a 1% increase in $ vs CHF but now dying down again

Sfr is more expensive than USD - 1 CHF = 1.00522 USD
Has this happened before? Is this the first time?

Nope, it happened (briefly) last November as well.
EDIT: and also back in Spring 2008.

Also about a week ago if my memory is working correctly.

below 1:1 is is a sort of critical point that the Franc usually bounces above but with more talk today by Fed of more QE then who knows.....

looks like this time it will stay this way for sometime. truly historic

There has been around 4 times passing parity but only short impulses to around .99.

Let's see if this pschyc. barrier will be really broken or not.

Live rates at 2010.09.24 11:40:00 UTC
1.00 CHF = 1.02106 USD

I also find 1.00 GBP = 1.57259 USD interesting, as I've been casually observing the pound/dollar rate for the last 20 years or more and have noticed that after a large fluctuation sterling usually settles back to somewhere in between 1.60 and 1.70 USD. On the current trend it seems to be going there again. Then again, who knows this time around?

I transferred some money to the UK today and got a rate of 1.56 through UBS. Seemed closer to the buy rather than sell rate

i think he is dead wrong. dollar is a bad investment. until the recent swiss QE shenanigans i would have said CHF was also a good bet, though now i'd favour the NOK.

no doubt gold is in a bubble, but with good reason. i imagine we will see the collapse of the USD within the next decade triggering a dash for safe havens such as gold and commodities.

Its certainly heading that way - record low for USDCHF this afternoon of 0.978. Quite ridiculous really but then currency movements always overshoot either way before stabilising and they do seem to be using more paper printing hundred dollar bills and treasury bills than copies of the Wall Street Journal these days.

A very depressing outlook for the USD, at least from some perspectives!

According to these guys:

http://forecasts.org/sfranc.htm

the near future doesn't look much brighter.

Pierre Mirabaud was interviewed on the TSR evening news yesterday, and predicted a continuous decline for the USD over the next ten years. He also recommended that everyone have at least 10% of their savings in gold! Is that for real?

Cool! When the US$ slides so do most of the Asian currencies, and that is my favouite holiday destination. Down, I say! Just hope the UK£ doesn't crash with them, as nearly all my money is there, but it probably will. Oh well.

to PINOT - "When I do go to change to CHF do I expect to get close to the same exchange rate and commission rates as if I just exchange it when transferring over to Swiss account and bypass the USD account here first?"

If I understand the question to be : is the FX rate for a change done at the time of the transfer from the US similar than the one of a change from a US$ account in a Swiss bank into CHF, the answer is most likely.

Reason for this is that the $ don't actually cross borders, they stay in correspondent bank accounts in the USA anyway so the process is the same.

Also, I found Swiss banks very competitive on exchange rates, so you may actually get a better deal by "moving" the $ first into a $ account held at a Swiss bank.

It appears to me that the USA will have QE2 (Quantative Easing 2nd lot) and this means the USA continues to be in the sh*t and this means the dollar will fall further as people move to the Euro.

The Euro will fall later when Greece or some other country gets into trouble and the world realsies that Europe is in a mess. Europe cannot be held together by Germany's exports.

The Swiss Franc is therefore the currency of choice for those that know it exists and I see the Swiss Franc strong against the US Dollar; Euro and GB Sterling that will also be weaker further soon.

You should just appreciate that you can save your Swiss francs and if you for some reason go back to your homeland have more money than you would have at the rate it was when you arrived.

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I do not have friends..........I have contingent liabilities

AFAIK, 10% in gold for security was a common recommendation from financial advisors up until the yellow metal fell out of favour around it's bottom in 2000.

edit: the problem with gold in a paper financial economy where everyone makes their money by taking a slice of each transaction in fees, is that physical gold holders do few transactions because of the spread. This is why the bankers didn't/don't promote gold - they don't make money out of it (unless it's a paper ETF).

My advise; Don't touch ETFs. If you want to get into Gold, buy the real thing and put it in a Safe Deposit Box.

ask those from weimar germany or zimbabwe whether they would have liked to have 10% of their savings in gold instead of zim dollars or weimar marks.

if i held usd or gbp, i would definitely diversify. it's not so much an investment as an insurance policy. although if you had bought, it would have already made you a lot of money.

gbp has already devalued by a massive amount and gbp without hyper-inflation (yet). i suspect that the US could default rather than devalue but who knows the lobbying power of those who would rather the taxpayer/pensioners/savers take the hits over the banks/creditors.

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Yes, one of the benefits of gold is that it is no-one else's liability. Allocated gold is the minimum to retain this property of gold. Speculation about the actual gold : paper gold ratio put it as much as 1 : 100 at the wild end of the range.

1CHF is still worth more than 1 US$, stayed this way for over 1 week now, unusual....