Credit Suisse

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...

Credit Suisse is a Lead Partner for 2015’s Musicus Fest and Musicus Heritage community concert series, organised by Trey Lee’s Hong Kong SAR (China) based charity Musicus Society with the mission to promote music and its education through cross-cultural collaboration. ----------------------------------------­----------------------------------------­--------- Check out our Sponsorship playlist for more related videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE6EB974C0554B3E5 Subscribe to our...

Argentinian voters blew their country’s presidential race wide open on October 25 with an unexpectedly close vote that will force the country’s first-ever runoff election on November 22. But the victor of that contest will receive a dubious prize: Argentina’s next president will have to deal with a stalled economy, dwindling foreign exchange reserves, an overvalued currency, and a large budget gap.   Polls conducted just before the recent vote suggested that Daniel Scioli, who served...

How wealthy has China become? At last count, the country accounted for a full 8 percent of all global ultra-high net worth investors—those worth more than $50 million. What will those UHNWIs do with that newfound wealth? That’s an important question, because household wealth is a key driver of consumers’ consumption and investment decisions as well as entrepreneurial activity, and that holds true whether one is Chinese, American, or otherwise.   China and the United States led the...

Just as a fierce storm can change the shape of a shoreline, liquidity has drained away from the post-crisis financial markets, creating new and unfamiliar sandbars where investors can wind up shipwrecked if they’re not careful. To navigate the newly parched market, Credit Suisse’s Private Banking and Wealth Management division says that investors must not only pay much closer attention to liquidity risks in their portfolios, but also learn to use illiquidity to their advantage.   The...

On October 5, after 10 years of negotiations, 12 Pacific Rim countries that account for a combined 40 percent of global GDP agreed to a sweeping trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The final text of the agreement isn’t public yet, but it appears that it would eliminate a large number of tariffs on goods and services, require state-owned enterprises to obey international trade laws, set stricter environmental and labor standards, and establish international tribunals to...