SNB & CHF

Box Tama Vakeesan was born in Switzerland – to Tamil parents from Sri Lanka. She meets make-up artist, Kavi, and they discuss why Tamil women still try to make their skin lighter. Is it a hangover from Sri Lanka's colonial past? (SRF Kulturplatz/swissinfo.ch) --- swissinfo.ch is the international branch of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC). Its role is to report on Switzerland and to provide a Swiss perspective on international events. For...

The Used Goods Question Retail sales in several countries like Germany, Japan and Switzerland continue to fall or they remain steady for years. In the United States they have strongly risen recently. We should remind readers, that used goods sold via Ebay or similar, are not contained in this statistics. Still they create economic value for the purchases. By mentality, Swiss, Germans or Japanese pay more attention so...

Lady Gaga, Leonardo DiCaprio and Donald Trump - Marco Grob has taken pictures of them all. But what does it take to produce iconic photographs? To answer this and other questions, the star photographer has set up the first International Photo Festival in Olten. (SRF/swissinfo.ch) Born in Olten, Grob started his career in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Since 2008 he's been living and working in New York. He's worked for TIME Magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine, National...

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by 0.05% to 1.1441 CHF. EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, August 31(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates The US dollar recovery was marginally extendedin Asia, and while it remains firm, it is lost some of its momentum. The Fed’s target inflation measure, the core PCE deflator, may decline from 1.5% to 1.4%, according to the median forecast in...

The number of cyber-attacks in Switzerland is reportedly on the rise (Keystone) Around 21,000 passwords and personal details used to access online services have been stolen and could be used illegally, Switzerland’s cybercrime monitoring centre has reported. The Reporting and Analysis Centre for Information Assurance (MELANI) said on Tuesday that a confidential source had sent copies of the stolen data to the cybercrime...

Waiting for the Flood We have noticed a proliferation of pundits, newsletter hawkers, and even mainstream market analysts focusing on one aspect of the bitcoin market. Big money, institutional money, public markets money, is soon to flood into bitcoin. Or so they say. We will not offer our guess as to whether this is true. Instead, we want to point out something that should be self-evident. If big money is soon to come...

​   Gold set to shine as Washington stumbles “Bet on gold’s diversifying properties rather than political stability” World’s largest asset manager believes Trump and political drama in the U.S. means gold likely to rise Real rates flattening out and rising political instability – Blackrock’s Koesterich “For now my bias would be to stick with gold” – Blackrock U.S. debt ceiling issue to be fractious as bankrupt U.S....

This week the Bureau of Economic Analysis will release updated estimates for Q2 GDP as well as Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) and Personal Incomes for July. Accompanying those latter two accounts is the currently preferred inflation standard for the US economy. The PCE Deflator finally hit 2% and in two consecutive months, after revisions, earlier this year. - Click to enlarge  The inability of consumer...

The growth of diesel-powered cars is stagnating in Switzerland (Keystone) - Click to enlarge Swiss citizens are calling on their government to more quickly require stricter anti-pollution tests for diesel cars. Some 7,200 people submitted a petition to the Federal Chancellery on Tuesday. The petition, also supported by various environmental and consumer lobby groups, asks Swiss Transport Minister Doris Leuthard to...

08/30/17 Brown Brothers Harriman's Marc Chandler weighs in on expectations for the Federal Reserve in 2017. Chandler considers the divergent outlook for the ECB vs the FOMC and the implications for the EUR/USD.