Most people don't realize that the central banks of Belgium, Japan, Greece, Switzerland, and South Africa are all publicly-traded. In times past, central clearinghouses were typically privately-owned while the issuance of bank-notes was the domain of competing banks. The fact that a few central banks still retain traces of their former private nature is a good reminder that centralized banking isn't necessarily the domain of the public sector. The Swiss National Bank , for instance, was founded in 1907 to take upon itself the issuance of national bank notes, hitherto provided by private banks. According to Hübscher and Kuhn ( pdf ), efforts to establish a wholly government-owned central bank were defeated in an 1897 national referendum. Opponents of the plan drew up an alternative proposal for a privately owned bank the structure of which would, according to Bordo, "not allow for state socialism or the public control of credit policy." One fifth of the new bank's ...