Krona Float — 19 November 1992
After raising the marginal overnight interest rate to 500 percent on 16 September 1992 in a failed defence of the pegged krona, the Riksbank allowed the currency to float on 19 November 1992 during the European ERM crisis. The krona depreciated about 9 percent immediately and 20 percent by year-end. The float ended Sweden's fixed-exchange regime and led to the 1993 2-percent inflation target and 1999 central-bank independence.
The 19 November 1992 krona float is the single sharpest macroeconomic break in modern Swedish history. During the wider European ERM crisis, the Riksbank defended the pegged krona by raising the marginal overnight rate to 500 percent on 16 September 1992 — a defence ultimately impossible to sustain.
Two months of attrition followed, including a cross-bloc September krispaket negotiated between Carl Bildt and opposition leader Ingvar Carlsson to demonstrate fiscal seriousness to currency markets. The defence still failed. On 19 November 1992 the Bildt cabinet and the Riksbank under Governor Bengt Dennis let the krona float, producing an immediate ~9 percent depreciation against the ECU basket and roughly 20 percent by year-end.
The float ended Sweden’s post-war fixed-exchange regime. In January 1993 the Riksbank adopted a 2 percent CPI inflation target; in 1999 formal central-bank independence was codified by law. That sequence — floating krona, inflation target, independent Riksbank — became the macroeconomic anchor of Swedish policy for the next three decades and made the 2003 euro referendum a meaningful choice rather than a forced reversal.