Credit Suisse

At the beginning of 2014, there were 43 known “unicorns” worldwide — private companies valued at $1 billion or more. As of November 2015, that number had nearly tripled to 132. The rapid growth in the number of well-funded, late-stage private companies raises several important questions: If companies can raise so much money without tapping capital markets, why do they even need to go public? More importantly, are valuations getting so lofty that they warrant concern? Jim Breyer, founder...

On November 30, the International Monetary Fund invited the renminbi to join the pound, euro, U.S. dollar, and yen in an exclusive club of international reserve currencies starting in October 2016. China has been working to make its currency a credible global player for at least two decades, and the nod from the IMF is a significant symbolic victory. Still, don’t expect central banks to scoop up mass quantities of renminbi just yet.   Central banks currently hold only about one percent...

December could be a big month for central bankers. The Federal Reserve is expected to make its first rate hike in nine years on December 16, while the European Central Bank is expected to announce further easing measures on December 3. The Swiss National Bank is likely to follow the ECB’s footsteps, sending deposit rates in the country even further into negative territory. Those moves, particularly combined with the divergence from American monetary policy, should provide a boost to European...

The same, only more of it. That’s the kind of year 2016 promises to be, according to Credit Suisse’s Global Markets annual outlook. Markets will obsess over if, when, and how much the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates. (Four times starting in December for a total of 1 percentage point, says Credit Suisse.) Credit Suisse’s Global Markets team believes global economic growth will pick up, driven by improvement in the U.S. and Europe, central bank policy will diverge further, and...

It’s no secret that one of the best ways to be successful when investing in capital markets is to buy when everyone else is selling. But that doesn’t make it any easier, especially when market turbulence is coming from several sources at once. Already on edge as a result of China’s surprise devaluation in August and a potential rate hike by the Federal Reserve, investors have had to figure out how to navigate financial markets amid high levels of both volatility and uncertainty. Watch an...

In July, six months after Greece elected a left-wing, anti-austerity government, the country came perilously close to leaving the euro. So it’s easy to understand why markets are nervous at the prospect of Portugal, a poster child for European austerity, replacing its reform-friendly, center-right government with a left-wing, anti-austerity coalition. The yield on 10-year Portuguese government bonds jumped 53 basis points to peak at 2.83  percent on November 9 since the ruling Social...

The November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris claimed 129 lives and are changing the political climate in France and Europe. One thing they haven’t done, however, is roil financial markets. Both the Stoxx 50, Europe’s blue-chip index, and France’s benchmark CAC 40 index were up 2.1 percent in the first three days of trading after the attacks.   Certain sectors – airlines, hotels, luxury goods, and financial stocks – took a hit on the Monday after the attacks. Even within these sectors,...

It’s not that the sharing economy itself is a new idea. Monasteries loaned books to the public in the Middle Ages, farmers have shared tools and labor for centuries, and the first known car rental service popped up in 1904. What is new is how quickly an extremely varied set of companies built around sharing, renting, collaborating, and accessing items on-demand are growing, thanks in large part to the proliferation of smartphones. There are 44 privately held sharing-oriented businesses that...

With profitability at U.S. corporations touching historic highs, and corporate cash piles as large as they’ve ever been, one of the top tasks of executives these days is simply deciding how best to spend the money. Companies in the S&P 500 had an aggregate cash balance of $1.43 trillion in the second quarter of 2015, which tied a record set in the fourth quarter of 2014.   So what should companies be doing with all that money? In a recent white paper, Credit Suisse Corporate...

Real GDP growth in the U.S. wasn’t particularly impressive in the third quarter –the 1.5 percent annualized increase came in just shy of the 1.6 percent consensus forecast and way down from the 3.9 percent reading in the second quarter. A look at the components of GDP growth, however, reveals a very positive signal for the future: Consumer spending has been the biggest contributor to GDP in recent quarters, and American consumers are spending enough to make up for stagnating exports and...