SNB & CHF

Combine financialization, neoliberalism and moral bankruptcy, and you end up with self-serving parasitic elites. When did our financial and political elites become self-serving parasites? Some will answer that elites have always been self-serving parasites; as tempting as it may be to offer a blanket denunciation of elites, this overlooks the eras in which elites rose to meet existential crises. Following in Ancient...

Swiss Franc EUR/CHF - Euro Swiss Franc, December 30(see more posts on EUR/CHF, ) The EUR/CHF remained close the SNB intervention point of 1.07. - Click to enlarge FX Rates In exceptionally thin conditions that characterize the year-end markets, a reportedly computer-generated order lifted the euro from about $1.05 to a little more than $1.0650 in a few minutes early in the Asian sessions. Before European markets...

Miners had been digging in one of Australia’s oldest collieries for almost a century until operations wound down a year ago, the victim of plunging global commodity prices. Now owner Glencore Plc is resuming output at the Queensland site, the latest sign of a profit bonanza bringing the world’s top metals and energy producers back from the brink. © Carol Buchanan | Dreamstime.com - Click to enlarge Everything from coal...

The “fake news” is that we’ve never been healthier, healthcare costs are under control and our economy has fully “recovered.” We’ve heard a lot about “fake news” from those whose master narratives are threatened by alternative sources and analyses. We’ve heard less about the master narratives being threatened: the fomenting of mass hysteria, which turns the populace into an easily manipulated and managed herd,...

  India’s Currency Ban – Part VI India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, announced on 8th November 2016 that Rs 500 (~$7.50) and Rs 1,000 (~$15) banknotes would no longer be legal tender. Linked are Part-I, Part-II, Part-III, Part-IV, and Part-V, which provide updates on the demonetization saga and how Modi is acting as a catalyst to hasten the rapid degradation of India and what remains of its institutions. There are...

  Arrested Development Despite the best efforts of the bulls to make history happen, they’ve been unable to ‘git-r-done.’  At the time of this writing, the Dow is facing another bout of arrested development; it has yet to notch 20,000 for the very first time. What a feat it will be when this remarkable, but trivial, event comes to pass.  After a near eight year run, the Dow will likely eclipse this exquisitely round...

Swiss Franc EUR/CHF - Euro Swiss Franc, December 29(see more posts on EUR/CHF, ) - Click to enlarge FX Rates In thin holiday markets, a correction to the trends seen in Q4 has materialized. The US dollar is heavy.  Japanese and European equities are lower.  Bonds are firmer. Some reports try to link the moves to the unexpected weakness in the US pending home sales, but this is a stretch and merely seeks to...

With January just around the corner, the world’s billionaires, CEOs, politicians and oligarchs prepare to take their private planes to Davos, Switzerland for their annual convocation at the World Economic Forum, where they discuss such diverse topics as global warming due to greenhouse gases (which exempts Gulfstream jets) and the dangers of record wealth inequality (which exempts them), while snacking on $39 hot dogs...

  Barbarous Huns Life is one long struggle in the dark. – Lucretius BALTIMORE – In January of this year, the Empire Herald reported that a “meth-addled couple” had eaten a homeless man in New York City’s Central Park. Later, Now8News reported that a can of cookie dough had “exploded in a woman’s vagina”; the woman was alleged to be shoplifting. . The fellows depicted above certainly mesh perfectly with the image of...

  Sentiment Extremes Below is an update of a number of interesting data points related to the gold market. Whether “interesting” will become “meaningful” remains to be seen, as most of gold’s fundamental drivers aren’t yet bullishly aligned. One must keep in mind though that gold is very sensitive with respect to anticipating future developments in market liquidity and the reaction these will elicit from central banks....