SNB & CHF

Time to say good buy? Visitors at the SIHH last year The Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH) has opened in Geneva with 35 watch brands showing off their wares. SIHHexternal link will run until Thursday, when it is open to the public, who must register and pay CHF70 ($71.20) in advance. It is the first watch fair of the year and important in terms of setting trends, particularly in the luxury segment. A...

Marc Chandler, Wilf Frost, and Sara Eisen on the CNBC - Click to enlarge I joined Wilf Frost, and Sara Eisen on the CNBC set at the NYSE shortly after the House of Commons delivered an unprecedented defeat to UK Prime Minister May. Catherine Mann (Citi) and Christopher Smart (Barings). The guests generally agreed that a delay in Brexit was likely. Here is a distillation of my thoughts. Not all made into the video clip...

As I wrote yesterday, “In the West, consumer prices overall are pushed around by oil. In the East, by food.” In neither case is inflation buoyed by “money printing.” Central banks both West and East are doing things, of course, but none of them amount to increasing the effective supply of money. Failure of inflation, more so economy, the predictable cost. In yesterday’s article the topic in the East was China. Today,...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.17% at 1.1272 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, January 15(see more posts on EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: Several of the equity benchmarks are flirting with six-week highs, including MSCI Asia Pacific Index and the Emerging Markets Index. The Dow Jones Stoxx 600 is trying to extend its advancing streak for a third week, something not...

Zinke’s new employer invests in fintech, blockchain, cyber security and energy projects. Former United States interior secretary Ryan Zinke has landed his first job since leaving the Trump administration two weeks ago. Zinke has joined investment company Artillery One as managing director, swissinfo.ch has learned. Zinke ended his nearly two-year stint as US Secretary of the Interior at the beginning of this year...

This exhaustion of the neocolonial-neofeudal model was inevitable, and as a result, so too is the decline and fall of the European integration/exploitation project. That a single currency, the euro, would fracture rather than unite Europe was understood long before the euro’s introduction as legal tender on January 1, 2002. The euro, the currency of 19 of the 28 member states of the European Union, is only one of the...

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by 0.33% at 1.1248 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, January 14(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: China’s exports and imports were weaker than expected, though the trade surplus swelled to its widest in a couple of years. The implications have undermined equities and weighed on risk appetites more broadly. Nearly all the...

For years, people blamed the global financial crisis on greed. Doesn’t this make you want to scream out, “what, were people not greedy in 2007 or 1997??” Greed utterly fails to explain the phenomenon. It merely serves to reinforce a previously-held belief. Far be it from us to challenge previously-held beliefs (OK, OK, we may engage in some sacred-ox-goring from time to time), but this is not a scientific approach to...

In recent weeks, the macro story focused on the shifting outlook for Fed policy and the Sino-American trade relationship. There is unlikely to be further progress on either issue in the week ahead. The Fed won’t raise interest rates until toward the middle of the year at the earliest. The government shutdown will limit new readings on the US economy. US and Chinese officials just met.  Mid-level Chinese officials can...

Rome and Brussels reached a compromise on the Italian government’s budget plans last month. But there are plenty of reasons for thinking this will be a challenging year for Italy. After battling for more than two months over a 2019 budget plan defiantly non-compliant with the EU fiscal rules, Rome and Brussels struck a last-minute agreement in December that avoided opening an Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP). To avoid...