SNB & CHF

We’ve been playing two games to mask insolvency: one is to pay the costs of rampant debt today by borrowing even more from future earnings, and the second is to create wealth out of thin air via asset bubbles. The two games are connected: asset bubbles require leverage and credit. Prices for homes, stocks, bonds, bat guano futures, etc. can only be pushed to the stratosphere if buyers have access to credit and can...

Summary: Poor jobs growth won’t challenge June hike expectations but September and balance sheet. Little positive in today’s report. Drop in unemployment explained by drop in participation rate. Trade deficit was larger than expected, which may point to slower Q2 growth. United States Unemployment Rate The US unemployment rate unexpectedly fell to 4.3%, a new multi-year low, but it is a misleading optic for...

Swiss Franc The euro has depreciated by 0.24% to 1.0868 CHF. EUR/CHF - Euro Swiss Franc, June 02(see more posts on EUR/CHF, ) - Click to enlarge FX Rates The foreign exchange market is becalmed, leaving the US dollar narrowly mixed.  The euro has been confined to less than a 20-pip range through the Asian session and most of the European morning.  The news stream is light.  The US withdrawal from the Paris Accord...

A study of data from 195 countries from 1990 to 2015 published recently in the medical journal The Lancet, ranks Switzerland’s healthcare system third. The analysis looked at mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care. It considered both healthcare access and quality and was designed with the aim of normalising for local environmental and behavioural risks. - Click...

Whether or not San Francisco Fed President John Williams is right about US inflation and employment being about as close to the central bank’s targets as investors have seen – as he told CNBC two days ago – is irrelevant: The central bank is going to raise interest rates two more times this year no matter what happens to consumer prices, says Credit Suisse Chief Investment Officer for Switzerland Burkhard Varnholt....

.The essence of capitalism is not strictly capital. In the modern sense, the word capital has taken on other meanings, often where money is given as a substitute for it. When speaking about things like “hot money”, for instance, you wouldn’t normally correct someone referencing it in terms of “capital flows.” Someone that “commits capital” to a project is missing some words, for in the proper sense they are “committing...

  Keeping it Simple We recently (on Thursday last week to be precise) put together a few gold-related charts based on the “keep it simple” principle. The annual Incrementum “In Gold We Trust” report is going to be published shortly and contains a quite thorough technical analysis section, so we will keep this brief and just discuss a few things that have caught our eye. So what is the “conundrum”? We will get to that...

The Barry Foundation celebrated the arrival of two St Bernard litters at the end of March. The dogs were traditionally used to rescue people from avalanches in the mountains, but were later bred at the foundation in western-Switzerland which was set up to preserve the place of the dog in Swiss culture. (SRF, swissinfo.ch) At the beginning of June the puppies, each already weighing about 12kg, will leave the foundation to join their new owners. --- swissinfo.ch is the international branch of...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.01% to 1.0883 CHF. EUR/CHF - Euro Swiss Franc, June 01(see more posts on EUR/CHF, ) - Click to enlarge FX Rates The US dollar is mostly firmer against the major currencies.  It is consolidating yesterday’s losses more than staging much of a recovery.  Even sterling, where a YouGov poll has the Tory lead at three percentage points, down from seven previously, is above yesterday’s...

Companies have been spending money thinking of ways to cope with the strong franc - Click to enlarge Swiss companies invested record volumes in research and development (R&D) in 2015, despite the franc exploding in value at the start of that year. The private sector was responsible for most of the CHF22 billion ($22.6 billion) R&D spending in 2015, according to official figures released on Monday. This was an...