SNB & CHF

Sure, it’s been a bad year for investors, with the S&P posting the smallest of gains in the first half (all of which thanks to tech stocks) after several hair-raising, monthly incidents including February’s vol-spike, April’s real yield scare, May’s Emerging Market massacre and June’s trade war fears as shown in the following Citi chart… … but it’s hardly been apocalyptic: in fact, most of the shocks that took...

Traffic jam in Geneva: bad for the environment, bad for the nation's wallet. (Keystone) - Click to enlarge A government study has found that the so-called ‘external costs’ of various modes of transport collectively increased by almost CHF1 billion during the period 2010-2015. For walkers and cyclists, however, benefits outweigh the costs. The study, published on Thursdayexternal link by the Federal Office for Spatial...

See the introduction and the video for the terms gold basis, co-basis, backwardation and contango. Race to the Bottom Last week the price of gold fell $17, and that of silver $0.30. Why? We can tell you about the fundamentals. We can show charts of the basis. But we can’t get into the heads of the sellers. We can say that in the mainstream view, the dollar is rising. The dollar, in their view, is not measured in gold...

Pictet Wealth Management’s latest positioning across asset classes and investment themes. Asset Allocation On a tactical, rolling three-to-six-month basis, we are tilting away from a bullish to a neutral stance on developed-market equities as trade and political frictions are rising. That said, we remain more upbeat on their prospects after the summer. Recent sell-offs have vindicated our cautiousness regarding...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.19% to 1.1629 CHF. EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, July 06(see more posts on EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates The first set of US tariffs aims specifically at China were implemented, and the retaliatory actions were also launched. The tariffs cover hundreds of goods, though the initial amount of trade covered is relatively small at $34 bln....

Bitcoin’s origin can be traced back to September 15, 2008. This is the day the investment bank Lehman Brothers announced its bankruptcy and the financial crisis reached its peak. With the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers a ripple effect set in, several other banks had to be saved by their patrons, the states. These bail-outs wreaked havoc on the debt of many countries, which is why central banks initiated their massive...

Unlike this company being audited in Zurich, many Swiss firms are falling under the radar. (© KEYSTONE / CHRISTIAN BEUTLER) - Click to enlarge About 13,000 companies are not listed in the commercial register – a serious problem, notes the Swiss Federal Audit Office. Increased cooperation with the tax authorities could be a solution.  On Wednesday the office published an evaluationexternal link of how Switzerland has...

Martin Schlegel - Click to enlarge At its meeting of 4 July 2018, the Federal Council appointed Martin Schlegel as the new Alternate Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank (SNB), following the proposal of the SNB’s Bank Council. He will take up the position of Deputy Head of Department I as of 1 September. Martin Schlegel is currently Head of the SNB’s branch office in Singapore. Having graduated...

July 4th is an appropriate day to borrow Winston Churchill’s the gathering storm to describe the existential crisis that will envelope America within the next decade. There is no single cause of the gathering storm; in complex systems, dynamics feed back into one another, and the sum of destabilizing disorder is greater than a simple sum of its parts. Causal factors can be roughly broken into two categories: systemic...

Authored by Darryn Pollock via CoinTelegraph.com, Image courtesy of CoinTelegraph - Click to enlarge Bitcoin’s polarizing effect has people on both ends of the scale either proclaiming it is going to the moon or it is going to zero. The volatile, unprecedented, and revolutionary monetary system that is cryptocurrency has a future that not many can accurately predict, but as time has gone on, the idea that Bitcoin is...