Philipp Hildebrand did the right thing in stepping down as Switzerland’s central bank governor. The alternative was to compound the reputational damage caused by his family’s trading in and out of francs around the Swiss National Bank’s exchange rate cap. The resignation clears the way for the SNB to remove any doubts about its banking and monetary policy, which it must now promptly do.

As a policymaker, Mr Hildebrand has been courageous. In banking regulation, he joined the side of progress by throwing the SNB’s support behind policies such as the high capital ratio requirements known as the Swiss finish. A country so reliant on banking owes thanks to a central banker who sees and says that the national interest is not always identical to the interests of Switzerland’s two big investment banks. (Elsewhere, the Swiss finish gives the lie to claims that tougher capital rules drive banks away.) Choosing actively to manage the currency also showed Mr Hildebrand as a central banker for the real economy and not only for financiers.

Activism earned Mr Hildebrand enemies: bankers; cantons that lazily relied on SNB dividends suspended when its currency trades incurred paper losses; monetary purists nestling in the Swiss People party’s (SVP) populist ranks.