About 5.3 million Swiss citizens, including registered members of the Swiss Abroad community, are eligible to take part in the June 10, 2018 ballot. Votes on a broad range of issues, as well as elections, also take place in many cantons and municipalities across the country.









The Swiss sovereign-money referendum of June 2018, also known as the Sovereign-Money Initiative, aims to give the central bank of Switzerland the sole authority of "creating money."





This is actually what the proponents of the Swiss "Vollgeld Initiative" want. They say only the government, through the publicly-owned Swiss central bank (SNB), should be able to create money and put it into circulation.





The Sovereign Money Initiative aims to give the Swiss Confederation a monopoly on money creation, including demand deposit (full-reserve banking, by including the creation of scriptural money in the legal mandate of the Swiss National Bank. The name of the initiative was inspired by the book 100% Money of Nobel Prize laureate Irving Fisher. The Swiss National Bank is opposed to the referendum.





The initiative calls for all credit issued by commercial banks to be backed with real money created by the Swiss National Bank (SNB). The central bank would issue loans to commercial banks to underpin the credit they extend to individuals and businesses.





At present, only a portion of commercial bank lending is backed by actual money. The rest of the loan exists on paper, creating a large pool of non-central bank issued ‘money’ – around 90% of the total supply in Switzerland, according to the sovereign money camp.





Proponents of the initiative fear another financial crisis if too many debtors default, as happened in 2008. Forcing commercial banks to cover every franc of credit they generate would make them think twice about issuing too much. This in turn would protect the economy against boom and bust cycles, bank collapses and customer deposits being burned, the argument runs.























