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
capital would be given to the private banks to co