Global currency markets are roiling after Thursday's surprise decision by Switzerland's central bank to end a three-year-old policy that limited the franc from appreciating too much against the euro.

The move sent the franc soaring, triggering hundreds of millions of dollars of losses at banks including Barclays and Deutsche Bank and bankrupting several currency brokers overnight. Many financial observers have lambasted the Swiss central bank for failing to signal the move was coming.

Investor Jim Rogers, however, saw it all coming, and he wrote about it in his 2013 book "Street Smarts."

"I explained carefully and at length that it was coming and why," he said in an email to Business Insider. "I am still astonished they would ever have done something so foolish, but politicians throughout history have always done some amazingly foolish things."

Here's the excerpt from the book:

Some of Switzerland's most prestigious banks were established in the aftermath of the French Revolution, during the turmoil that gripped France under Napoleon. Bank people fled France and took their money over the mountains to Geneva, which was not very far away. You will see that some of the great old Swiss banks, the private banks, were founded in 1795, 1803, years like that. But by then Swiss banking traditions were already well established.