SNB & CHF

© Marcos del Mazo | Dreamstime.com Swissmedic, Switzerland’s drug approval agency, extended approval of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine for use on 12 to 17 year olds this week. On 9 August 2021, Swissmedic said that it had carefully examined an application from Moderna Switzerland and had decided to extend the temporary authorisation for the use of its Spikevax vaccine on 12 to 17 year olds. The application, which included data on 3,732 vaccinated children aged between...

Overview: The global capital markets are subdued today as investors wrestle with the rising virus, the shifting stance of several central banks, and a more tense geopolitical backdrop.  Equity markets are struggling today.  Most of the large bourses in the Asia Pacific region, including Japan, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, moved lower, and Europe's Dow Jones Stoxx 600 threatens to snap an eight-session advance.  US futures are narrowly mixed.   The US 10-year yield...

A momentous day, for sure, but one lost in what would turn out to be a seemingly endless sea of them. October 8, 2008, right in the thick of the world’s first global financial crisis (how could it have been global, surely not subprime mortgages?) the Federal Reserve took center stage; or tried to. Having bungled Lehman, botched AIG, and then surrendered to Treasury which then screwed up TARP, the world’s entire financial edifice was burning down while US...

So sorry, America, but your central bank is certifiably insane, and it’s not going to magically work out. History definitively shows that speculative bubbles always pop–always. Every speculative bubble mania, regardless of its supposed uniqueness–“it’s different this time”–pops. No speculative bubble has ever “reached a permanently high plateau” and then remained on the plateau for years. So what does the Federal Reserve do? It inflates the biggest speculative...

Imagine you are in command of the state, defined as an institution that possesses a territorial monopoly of ultimate decision making in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving the state and its agents itself, and, by implication, the right to tax, i.e., to unilaterally determine the price that your subjects must pay you to perform the task of ultimate decision making. To act under these constraints — or rather, lack of constraints — is what constitutes...

Fifty years ago the "Nixon Shock" closed the 'Gold Window' on "international speculators" and killed the Bretton Woods gold exchange era. That's what we're told. Actually, Bretton Woods died a decade (or more!) earlier; it's just that we only noticed in 1971. Jeff Snider, Head of Global Investment Research for Alhambra Investments and Emil Kalinowski. Follow Twitter: https://twitter.com/JeffSnider_AIP Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilKalinowski Topics 00:00 Show Intro:...

 Overview: The US dollar remains firm ahead of the July CPI release, and even though Chicago Fed Evans demurred from the hawkish talk, the market is getting more comfortable with the idea of a rate hike next year.   The implied yield of the December 2022 Eurodollar futures is rising for the sixth consecutive session.  Most emerging market currencies are also under pressure.  The JP Morgan Emerging Market Currency Index edged up yesterday to snap a five-day drop but...

It’s not just the trade data from individual countries. Take the WTO’s estimates which are derived from exports and imports going into or out of nearly all of them. These figures show that for all that recovery glory being printed up out of Uncle Sam’s checkbook, the American West Coast might be the only place where we can find anything resembling Warren Buffett’s red-hot claim. That’s a problem, and much bigger one that may otherwise appear especially given current...

The number of outstanding mortgages increased by 3% on last year Keystone / Urs Flueeler A report by the leading Swiss bank UBS has found an increased risk of a real estate bubble forming in Switzerland’s housing market. The UBS Swiss real estate bubble index has risen from 1.78 to 1.90 points, in the second quarter of 2021, remaining in the ‘risk zone’, according to a report published on Tuesday. The increase is driven by a rapid rise in prices in the Swiss...

No sooner did we write Silver Rorschach Test, than the price of gold flash-crashed, or was smashed down. On Sunday afternoon in Arizona—i.e. Monday morning in Australia and Asia—the gold price dropped sharply. Gold bug sources claim that the drop was $100, but as we can see from the price graph included in this report, the actual crash itself was about $70. Some of these sources were very quick to assert that the drop was caused by naked selling of gold futures...