SNB & CHF

Until last week you hadn’t heard much about the bond market rally. I told you we were probably near a rally way back in early April when the 10 year was yielding around 1.7%. And I told you in mid-April that the 10 year yield could fall all the way back to the 1.2 to 1.3% range. The bond rally since April has been of the stealth variety, the financial press and market strategists dismissing every tick down in rates as nothing. It was a lonely trade to put on and yes...

The interests of small innovative countries must be taken into account in international corporate tax measures, says Swiss Finance Minister Ueli Maurer, who has been attending the G20 meeting in Italy. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, (centre), arrives for a G20 meeting on Friday, the first one to be held in person since the pandemic began Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved Tax was a key issue at the two-day meeting of finance ministers and...

Climate change is causing extreme weather, also in Switzerland. A climate taskforce – like the Covid 19 science task force – makes sense, a leading Swiss climate scientist says. Wildfire in Doyle, California, US, on July 10 Keystone / Noah Berger Humankind should get used to heatwaves, fires, torrential rain, landslides, flooding and bad harvests, Sonia Seneviratne,External link a professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at the Swiss Federal...

So much going on this week in the bond market, it actually overshadowed the ridiculous noise coming from the Fed’s reverse repo. Some maybe too many want to make a huge deal out of this RRP if only because the numbers associated with it have gotten so big. To end Q2 2021, financial counterparties “lent” just about $1 trillion to the Fed. Holy cow! A trillion! There’s way too much money! Eh. The RRP, especially around its more informative margins, has little to do...

There is quite an unusual price context for new week’s economic events, which include June US CPI, retail sales, and industrial production, along with China’s Q2 GDP, and the meetings for the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Bank of Canada, and the Bank of Japan. In addition, the US Treasury will sell $120 bln in coupons while the US earned income tax credit and the child tax credit is rolled out. The dollar surged even while interest rates fell. The US 10-year yield...

Interview original date: December 14, 2020 Topics- Were the Dot-Com Bubble and the Housing Bubble caused by the exponential growth of shadow money since the late 80s? Risk, liquidity, Credit Bubble of ’95, China, Eurodollar System. Rehypothecation and how it works: return, leveraging assets, Repo Market, treasuries, repledging, collateral, derivatives. Central Banks, Global Monetary System, Salomon Brothers. Collateral shortage: is that the problem? Or is the financial system too...

The European Commission has given the Swiss Covid certificate a green light for inclusion on the EU-wide digital Covid certificate platform. This means that holders of Swiss Covid certificates are able to present their Swiss-issued Covid certificate QR codes at ports of entry into EU nations under the same conditions as holders of certificates from EU nations. © maramade | Dreamstime.com The Swiss Covid certificates are valid in 27 EU countries plus Iceland and...

According to RTS, Brussels is close to giving the Swiss Covid certificate a green light for inclusion on the EU-wide digital Covid certificate platform. This means that Swiss residents will soon be able to present their Swiss-issued Covid certificate QR codes at ports of entry into EU nations. © Valerio Rosati | Dreamstime.com Swiss digital Covid certificates are expected to work in the EU by Friday 9 July 2021 or next Monday. According to RTS, a commission, composed...

All debt-fueled speculative bubbles pop, even as cheerleaders claim otherwise. The expansion of Housing Bubble #2 is clearly visible in these two charts of house valuations, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve database (FRED). The first is the Case-Shiller Index, which as you recall tracks the price of homes on an “apples to apples” basis, i.e. it tracks price movements for the same house over time. Note that this is an index chart where the index is set at 100...

In his book Denationalisation of Money, F.A. Hayek argued that governments have never devoted their power to providing proper money over time. They “have refrained from grossly abusing it only when they were under such a discipline as the gold standard imposed.”1 The gold backing of the US dollar as the global reserve currency was lifted in the early 1970s, and paper currencies, so-called fiat currencies, have since become the norm. Following this decision, the paper...