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After nearly ten years of European Union (EU) opposition to certain controversial Swiss tax structures, Switzerland’s government agreed a deal in 2014 to do away with such arrangements. Under current rules Swiss cantons can offer preferential tax rates to certain companies, mostly multinationals with most of their activity abroad. This is now changing. What are preferential tax deals? They are special low tax deals Swiss cantons offer only to specific companies. In the canton of Vaud, the...

Swiss resident companies and individuals applied for more patents than those in the UK in 2015. The European patent office’s recently released annual report, shows there were 7,088 Swiss-based european patent applications compared to the UK’s 5,037. On the face of it these numbers are not too far apart. On a per capita basis there is a more than tenfold difference. Switzerland filed 873 european patents per million residents. The UK filed 79. In addition, Switzerland is well ahead of its...

Last year the Swiss government decided to increase the fees train operators, including Swiss Rail, must pay to run their trains on Switzerland’s rail network. © Hai Huy Ton That | Dreamstime.com Switzerland has 4,641 km of track running as high as 3,454 metres, and one of the densest rail networks in the world. Maintaining all of this track costs a lot of money, and some of it comes from train operators, that pay to use certain sections of track at specified times. The system works in much...

Investec Switzerland. The SMI is set to close higher this week but lagging behind gains of global equity markets after heavyweight Roche fell almost 5% on Thursday after paying its dividend. © Blopatic | Dreamstime.com Stock markets around the world extended their rally this week, continuing to benefit from substantial gains in the price of crude oil after data showed declines in American oil production. Risk appetite also increased this week as investors begin to...

Le Matin. The National council thinks shops should stay open until 8pm across all of Switzerland. 115 members against 68 would like to see shop opening hours harmonised across the country. The proposal would mean that retailers across Switzerland would be allowed to open from 6am until 8pm from Monday to Friday and from 6am until 6pm on Saturdays. Public holidays would be exempted and cantons would be able to opt for longer opening hours if they chose to. A fight against cross-border...

20 Minutes. Geneva’s Ensemble à gauche and Socialist parties want to see compulsory dental care and presented a proposal to Geneva’s parliament in mid-February. On Monday Geneva’s labour party (Parti du travail) launched a cantonal initiative for the same thing. © Nejron | Dreamstime.com The plan would be funded by compulsory salary deductions of 1%. Half of this would be categorised as a payment by employers and half by employees. In many cases the full 1% would eventually be born by...

Investec Switzerland. The Swiss economy returned to growth at the end of last year as it fought off the impact of a currency shock that had threatened to push the country into a recession. Gross domestic product rose 0.4 percent in the three months through December, after contracting 0.1 percent in the prior quarter, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs in Bern said on Wednesday. That’s the strongest quarter in a year and beats the median economist estimate for a 0.1...

    Hold your real assets outside of the banking system in a private international facility  -->  http://www.321gold.com/info/053015_sprott.html        USA: The New Switzerland? Written by Jeff Thomas (CLICK FOR ORIGINAL)            At one time, tax havens took great pride in calling themselves just that, since low-tax jurisdictions provide people with freedom from oppressive taxation. But, in recent decades, the...

Back in August 2012, when negative interest rates were still merely viewed as sheer monetary lunacy instead of pervasive global monetary reality that has pushed over $6 trillion in global bonds into negative yield territory, the NY Fed mused hypothetically about negative rates and wrote "Be Careful What You Wish For" saying that "if rates go negative, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing will likely be called upon to print a lot more currency as individuals and...

In many ways, 2016 has been the year that the world woke up to how far down Krugman’s rabbit hole (trademark) DM central bankers have plunged in a largely futile effort to resuscitate global growth. For whatever reason, Haruhiko Kuroda’s move into NIRP seemed to spark a heretofore unseen level of public debate about the drawbacks of negative rates. Indeed, NIRP became so prevalent in the public consciousness that celebrities began to discuss central bank policy on Twitter. When we say “for...