Swiss central bank profits boosted by gold price surge

With the help of skyrocketing gold prices and expanding stock markets, Switzerland’s central bank announced a profit of 12.6 billion Swiss francs ($15.7 billion) for the first nine months of 2025 on Friday.

The value of the gold held by the Swiss National Bank increased dramatically as investors rushed to purchase the precious metal when prices reached all-time highs due to geopolitical and economic worries.

A kilogramme of gold was worth 98,024 Swiss francs at the end of September, compared to 76,011 at the end of December 2024. This represents a 22.9 billion franc gain in the value of the SNB’s gold assets, the bank said in a statement.

The SNB recorded 23.1 billion Swiss francs in price gains on equity securities and instruments. This gain helped offset exchange rate-related losses totalling 46.3 billion francs.

Like gold, the Swiss franc is considered a major safe-haven asset. Amid the climate of uncertainty, the Swiss currency has appreciated significantly since the start of the year, particularly against the dollar.

In 2024, the SNB’s profits reached 62.5 billion Swiss francs after the first nine months and then rose to 80.7 billion francs by the end of the year.

Arturo Bris, a professor of finance at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, has voiced concerns about a potential artificial intelligence technology bubble.

Using data from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, he calculated that the SNB’s portfolio consists of about $48 billion in six tech stocks: Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta.

Instead of choosing stocks to make money, the Swiss central bank’s equities portfolio employs a passive method that mimics stock market indices in order to diversify its reserves.

Bris told AFP that a significant amount of the increase in the US stock market may be attributed to these six main stocks alone.

“As an economist, you cannot speak of a bubble before it happens,” only once it has burst, he said.

However, “there is a significant over-valuation of these stocks”, and if AI is a bubble that bursts and triggers a crash, “the risk is very high” for the SNB, he warned.