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Swiss cantons have very different tax bases, tax rates and costs. To even things up, and temper tax rate competition between cantons that jockey to attract the wealthiest residents with the lowest tax rates, Switzerland has a system known as la péréquation financière nationale in French, or Finanzausgleich in German, which requires “rich” cantons to give money to “poor” cantons. Yesterday, the Swiss federal government published the numbers for 2017. In 2017, the top three payers will...

Investec Switzerland. At least one Brexit warning light is still flashing red. While the pound has rallied in recent days and bookmakers have shortened their odds on a win for “Remain” in Thursday’s U.K.’s European Union referendum, the Swiss franc is still about 0.4 percent from the 2016 high it reached last week. © Sergey Kuzmin | Dreamstime.com The Swiss currency, traditionally sought by investors in times of market stress, climbed as the “Leave” campaign gained ground in...

The City of London and the pound would both benefit from the U.K. leaving the EU, says billionaire Peter Hargreaves. Brexit may knock the pound initially, but it would rebound, the co-founder of Hargreaves Lansdown — the largest U.K. retail broker, with more than $84.1 billion equivalent in assets — told Bloomberg Briefs' Geoff King in a June 17 interview. Q: Why do you support "Leave"? A: Every year in the EU it gets more political, it gets more legislative, more...

Investec Switzerland. The Swiss Market Index (SMI) is set to post one of its largest falls since February this week as growing uncertainty around the result of Britain’s referendum on its membership of the 28-nation European Union bloc led to a global sell-off of company shares. © Evgenyi Gromov | Dreamstime.com Stocks around the world tumbled and demand for safe haven assets sent sovereign bond yields to record lows as new opinion polls fueled anxiety that the UK will...

Investec Switzerland. Brexit backers who hold Switzerland as a model for the U.K. outside the European Union won’t find much support from British expatriates living in Geneva. Attending a British-Swiss Chamber of Commerce event addressed by the head of the “Leave” campaign recently at Geneva’s Mandarin Oriental hotel, most said the idea that Bern is free of the long arm of Brussels is a myth. © Neil Harrison | Dreamstime.com While the 41,000 Britons living in Switzerland...

Investec Switzerland. Three years after Lloyds Banking Group Plc sold its private bank in Geneva, the only signs of life at the now-empty building are piles of cigarette butts and nutshells lying on its dirty window ledges. The riverside offices at Place de Bel-Air are a short walk away from the remaining private banks, hedge-fund managers and luxury-goods stores in the heart of the Swiss city. The locked entrance, where millionaire clients used to come and go, is a reminder...

Investec Switzerland. Swiss Market Index (SMI) is set to close lower this week, underperforming global stocks after a stronger Swiss franc hurt domestic firms and Brexit fears weighed on investor sentiment. © James53145 | Dreamstime.com On the other side of the Atlantic, the S&P 500, an index which tracks the share prices of the top 500 US companies,  hit a seven-month high after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen painted a mostly upbeat picture of the economy on...

Investec Switzerland. Foreign-exchange traders, bracing for chaos on the night of Britain’s European Union referendum, are preparing to fall back on techniques perfected before the era of computerized transactions. © Lucian Milasan | Dreamstime.com Banks are ready to draw on lessons learned after some electronic platforms failed during the storm of volatility that followed the Swiss National Bank’s shock decision to remove its currency cap last year. One key failsafe as the...

Official unemployment numbers show there were 144,778 people registered as unemployed across Switzerland at the end of May 2016, 4,762 fewer than in April. This decline took the unemployment rate from 3.5% to 3.3%. Despite this improvement, there were 8,429 more without jobs than in May last year when the unemployment rate was 3.2%. © Edward J Bock 111 | Dreamstime.com The highest rate of unemployment of 4.3% was among those between 30 and 34 years old. Only 3.0% of those aged between 15 and...

Investec Switzerland. Once again, someone else’s crisis is threatening to make life more difficult for the Swiss. © Juan Moyano | Dreamstime.com Ever since it abandoned an exchange-rate cap in January 2015, the Swiss National Bank has battled against the franc’s appeal as a haven, guiding the currency lower with intervention and interest-rate cuts in an effort to keep the economy competitive. The strategy is finally paying off, with the franc just posting its weakest month...