SNB & CHF

Martin Hess believes Swiss banking fortunes can lift despite ongoing challenges (Keystone) - Click to enlarge The Swiss banking sector shrank once again last year in terms of banks, profits, share of offshore wealth under management and number of employees. The Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) nevertheless believes there are positives to be found amidst the bleak figures. “In an environment where banks have to cope...

Any deal would have significant implications for Switzerland’s largest telecom, Swisscom. (© KEYSTONE / GAETAN BALLY) The cantonal government of Graubünden has demanded that the cabinet sign Switzerland up to European Union rules abolishing roaming charges. Without such an agreement, the Swiss tourist industry is at a disadvantage, the Graubünden government said in a letter sent last week to Swiss president, Doris...

Jeffrey Snider: Eurodollar University Part 1 ------------------ Erik Townsend welcomes back Jeffrey Snider to MacroVoices. Erik and Jeffrey discuss: -- How Dollar .

According to orthodox theory, if interest rates are falling because of term premiums then that equates to stimulus. Term premiums are what economists have invented so as to undertake Fisherian decomposition of interest rates (so that they can try to understand the bond market; as you might guess it doesn’t work any better). It is, they claim, the additional premium a bond investor demands so as to hold a security that...

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...