SNB & CHF

© Ryzhov Sergey | Dreamstime.com One of the biggest challenges during the coronavirus outbreak will be ensuring there are enough qualified staff and equipment to keep the worst affected patients alive. Thierry Fumeaux, head of the Swiss Society of Intensive Medicine, told RTS there are 82 intensive care units (ICU) across Switzerland. These have a combined 850 places, of which 750 are equipped with breathing equipment. It is not clear how many of these places are...

Market sentiment is likely to open this week on an upswing after the Fed’s emergency rate cut and expanded QE were announced Sunday afternoon local time.  Yet as we have seen time and again this past couple of weeks, added stimulus has had little lasting impact on markets as the virus numbers continue to worsen.  Europe is now reporting more daily cases than China did at its peak.  We remain negative on EM until the global growth outlook becomes clearer. AMERICAS...

Today, according to the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), there were 815 confirmed cases in Switzerland. There are obvious challenges to this figure. Possibly the most important is the time lag between infection and a confirmed case. On average, there are 5.1 days between catching the virus and the onset of symptoms. If you look at the chart above from a WHO report on COVID-19 in China, which shows new coronavirus cases from 8 December until 20 February for...

The Panama Papers leaked by Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca revealed that 1,339 Swiss lawyers, financial advisers and other middlemen had set up more than 38,000 offshore entities over the last 40 years.  (Keystone / Alejandro Bolivar) The Swiss government faces resistance to efforts to tighten anti-money laundering rules that close loopholes for lawyers who act as “advisors” in setting up offshore financial structures. Anti-corruption expert Mark Pieth writes...

The decline phase of the S-Curve is just beginning. Globalization and Imperial Pretensions have been decaying for years; now the tide has turned definitively against them. The Covid-19 pandemic didn’t cause the demise of globalization and Imperial Pretensions; it merely pushed the rickety structures over the edge. It’s human nature to reckon the current trend will continue running more or less forever, and that temporal, contingent structures are...

◆ Stock markets around the world are collapsing today as the financial and economic implications of the impact of the pandemic on already massively indebted companies and governments is realised. ◆ Investors are liquidating en masse risk assets from equities to industrial commodities, while gold has held its ground. ◆ The FTSE 100 is down 5.8% in early trade, while Frankfurt’s DAX 30 plunged 6.8% the CAC 40 tumbled 6.5% and Dublin’s ISEQ index collapsed another...

Modern monetary theory, or MMT, has been getting a lot of attention lately, often celebrated as a revolutionary breakthrough. However, there is absolutely nothing new about it. The very basis of the theory, the idea that governments can finance their expenditures themselves and that therefore deficits don’t matter, actually goes back to the Polish Marxist economist Michael Kalecki (1899–1970). MMT as a Centralization Tool  MMT says that the national debt means that...

Der SMI ist heute morgen teilweise über 6% abgesackt. (Bild: Shutterstock.com/Pavel Ignatov) Die Aktienmärkte erlebten heute erneut einen schwarzen Tag mit Rekordverlusten: Der SMI stürzte um -9,64% auf 8270 Punkte ab, der Euro STOXX 50 um sage und schreibe -12,4% und der DAX tauchte ebenfalls zweistellig um -12,24%. Der Dow Jones lag kurz nach 18 Uhr mit -9,3% ebenfalls im tiefroten Bereich. Bereits am Morgen hatten die Börsen mit einem Kurssturz auf das...

Employees at the greatest risk are those who don’t have the luxury to work from home. (Keystone / Matteo Bazzi) Our regular analysis of what the biggest global companies in Switzerland are up to. This week: responsible business in an epidemic, child labour on coffee farms, and Responsible Business debate. What has made multinational companies in Switzerland so successful is exactly what is making them particularly vulnerable in a global epidemic. In the Financial...

Binningen – source: Wikipedia The coronavirus has claimed its fourth victim in Switzerland. A 54 year old man died yesterday in Binningen hospital in the canton of Basel-Landschaft, according to the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH). The man attended an evangelical church gathering of 2,000 people held between 17 and 24 February 2020 in the French city of Mulhouse. Several other cases of infection have been linked to the same gathering. The man, who had been in...