Central banks that trade on the stock market [2013]

“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. Though the shareholders of the five central banks may to some extent ‘own’ their nation’s central bank, they don’t exercise the same degree of control over their company that regular shareholders do.”

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2013/02/central-banks-that-trade-on-stock-market.html