SNB & CHF

© Xantana | Dreamstime.com In the seven days to 12 June 2020, the number of new SARS-CoV-2 infections recorded in Switzerland was 127. A similar number of new cases was recorded in the week before (108) and the week before that (121), according to Worldinfometer.com. However, the number of deaths was up slightly when comparing the recent week (17) to the week before (2). Switzerland has come a long way since its first confirmed case in Switzerland was recorded on 24...

The Federal Reserve’s models really are the most optimistic of the bunch. With the policy meeting conducted today, no surprises as far as policies go, we now know what ferbus has to say about everything that’s happened this year. Skipping the usual March projections, what with the FOMC totally occupied at the time by a complete global monetary meltdown Jay Powell now says “we saw it coming”, the central bank staff released the calculations performed by its DSGE...

The job, as Jay Powell currently sees it, means building up the S&P 500 as sky high as it can go. The FOMC used to pay lip service to valuations, but now everything is different. He’ll signal to all those fund managers by QE raising bank reserves, leading them on in what they all want to believe is “money printing” (that isn’t). This provides the financial services industry with the rationalization those working within it desperately want for them to do what they...

. [Review of Amity Shlaes, Great Society: A New History (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2019).] Most people associate the Great Society initiative with Lyndon Baines Johnson. There is very good reason for that, to be sure. As president, Johnson, the “master of the Senate,” was the driving force behind the raft of legislation that passed during his administration, the 1964 and 1965 legislation that framed and filled in his vision for a “great society” in which the...

◆The world is having serious doubts about the once widely accepted presumption of American exceptionalism. The era of the U.S. dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s primary reserve currency is coming to an end. In the 1960s French Finance Minister Valery Giscard d’Estaing coined that phrase largely out of frustration, bemoaning a United States that drew freely on the rest of the world to support its overextended standard of living. For almost 60 years, the...

To support biodiversity, forests need dead trees as well. Though it has more than it used to, Switzerland could use more deadwood. Urs-Beat Brändli, WSL Despite threats such as drought and insects, Swiss forests are better equipped to handle natural hazards than they were a decade ago. There’s also more diversity in terms of the types of trees found in Swiss woodlands, according to the forest inventory report presented on Wednesday. Detailed monitoring since 1983 has...

Sometimes the news drives the price action, but sometimes the price action drives the news.  If the initial rally in US stocks after the FOMC meeting had been sustained and if the dollar had continued to decline, observers would drawing a different conclusion. Because of the sell-off in risk assets, many observers are blaming the Fed’s pessimism. I do not see it that way. The median Fed GDP forecast for this year and next is above the OECD’s newest forecasts, for...

Concerns about still rising infection numbers and a second wave ofCovid-19 have contributed to today’s downdraft in risk assets; for now, the weak dollar trend is hard to fight Despite delivering no change in policy, the Fed nonetheless sent an unequivocally dovish signal; stocks have not reacted well to the Fed; weekly jobless claims and May PPI will be reported Peru is expected to keep rates steady at 0.25%; Brazil inflation data supports a 75 bp cut next week The...

. Come on, Jay, you can always goose stocks back to new highs after the election. Indulge me for a moment in some backroom speculation. It’s absurdly obvious that the unelected, permanent, ever-expanding National Security State, a.k.a the Deep State, and its Democratic Party allies have been attempting to torpedo Donald Trump since the 2016 election took them by surprise. (Imagine doing everything that worked so well in the past and failing at the last minute. Ouch....

Last Friday, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released new unemployment data. The report surprised many because it showed a decrease in the unemployment rate, while many observers had expected an increase. According to the official headline (seasonally adjusted) number, the unemployment rate was 13.3 percent in May. That was down from April’s rate of 14.7 percent. This data point was seized upon by commentators who insist that there will be a “V-shaped” recovery....