Hildebrand Steps Down at SNB, By Jennifer M. Freedman and Klaus Wille - Jan 9, 2012 6:37 AM MT, Bloomberg News

Philipp Hildebrand resigned as head of the Swiss central bank after a currency transaction by his wife last year dented the credibility of the franc’s chief guardian.
As head of the SNB, he helped toughen financial regulation, forcing UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group AG to boost capital buffers. He also lowered borrowing costs to zero and in September introduced the first currency ceiling since the 1970s to help protect the economy.
Hildebrand’s first round of currency purchases forced the SNB to declare a record loss in 2010 and prompted calls from Christoph Blocher, vice president of the Swiss People’s Party, for him to resign. Bank Sarasin, a Basel-based private bank, said on Jan. 3 it had fired an employee who helped pass data on the trades by the Hildebrands to Blocher.
Philipp Hildebrand from wikipedia

Hildebrand is currently under attack due to the losses arising from SNB’s exchange rate interventions between March 2009 and June 2010. In this period, the SNB accumulated foreign currency reserves worth over 200 billion Swiss francs. Since the Swiss franc has since appreciated substantially, the interventions caused losses on SNB foreign currency positions equivalent to 26.5 billion Swiss francs in 2010 and a further 11.7 billion Swiss francs in the six months thereafter.[4] Although the SNB has repeatedly defended these interventions as they made “sense at the zero lower bound when the traditional monetary policy instrument is exhausted”,[5] the international press and financial market analysts by and large deem the interventions a “costly failure”.[6]

Given the size of the loss (equivalent to around 5,000 francs per capita), Hildebrand is under fierce political attack for being the driving factor behind these interventions. Critics point out that the interventions were undertaken when there was no underlying need to intervene and that they were continued even when the European debt crisis in spring 2010 already had intensified so that the exchange rate the SNB was trying to support was unrealistic.

The right-wing People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) / Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC)) and the politically colored magazine Weltwoche are among the loudest critics of Hildebrand, repeatedly demanding his resignation. These attacks however led to prominent figures of other parties voicing their support for Hildebrand and moreover emphasized the political independence of the SNB. However, in an article titled “With Unsteady Hand”, Switzerland’s center-leaning major business magazine Bilanz criticized Mr. Hildebrand’s leadership of SNB, citing in particular his limited experience and that Mr. Hildebrand’s actions in large parts seem to be the result of his eagerness to appeal to the public.[7]

Christoph Blocher bio from Wikipedia

Blocher built his political career through campaigning for smaller government, for a free-market economy, against Switzerland's membership in the European Union and for more tightly controlled immigration. He represented the canton of Zürich in the Swiss National Council from 1980 until his election to the federal council in 2003 as a deputy of the Swiss People's Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei/Union démocratique du centre; SVP/UDC). In addition to the Zürich chapter of the Swiss People's Party, he led a mass organisation, the Action for an Independent and Neutral Switzerland (Aktion für eine unabhängige und neutrale Schweiz). He has frequently been compared by the media and his political opponents to figures such as Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jörg Haider.

Blocher is leader of the party's nationalist wing, which dominates the party's delegation to the National Council.
Germany issues debt with negative yield, By Richard Milne, Capital Markets Editor, January 9, 2012 12:04 pm, Financial Times, www.ft.com

Germany issued debt on Monday for the first time with a negative yield, meaning that investors were in effect paying Berlin for the privilege of lending it money.

A €4bn auction of 6-month bills drew a negative yield of 0.0122 per cent in a sign of Germany’s haven status amid the eurozone debt crisis.

But demand for the debt was down with the so-called bid-to-cover ratio dropping to 1.8 times from 3.8 times at the previous auction a month ago.

German short-term debt has traded at negative yields in the secondary market for some weeks with three-month, six-month and one-year debt all below zero. Bills for six-month debt hit a low of minus 0.3 per cent shortly after Christmas.