SNB & CHF

© Phillip Judd - Click to enlarge The contractural requirement for Swisscom to provide every commune with a telephone box comes to an end at the end of next year. Late last week, the Federal Council adopted a new plan that will come into force in 2018. Internet subscriptions without a fixed phone contract should also be part of the new plan. The current deal with Swisscom, which requires the company to provide...

If you don’t like what these charts are saying, please notify The Washington Post to add the St. Louis Federal Reserve to its list of Russian propaganda sites. Yesterday I described our gaslight financial system. Today we’ll look at our gaslight economy. Correspondent Jason H. alerted me to the work of author Thomas Sheridan ( Puzzling People: The Labyrinth of the Psychopath), who claims to have coined the...

Summary: The ECB accepts Greek bonds as collateral but does not include them in its asset purchases. A new staff-level agreement by the end of the year could change that. Finance ministers imply that Greece’s debt is sustainable, but the IMF disagrees. The ECB does not include Greek bonds in its sovereign bond purchase operation. However, the progress is being made, and it is possible that starting early next...

A Brief Recap India’s Prime Minister announced on 8th November 2016 that Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes will no longer be legal tender. Linked are Part-I, Part-II, Part-III, and Part-IV, which provide updates on the rapidly encroaching police state. Expect a continuation of new social engineering notifications, each sabotaging wealth-creation, confiscating people’s wealth, and tyrannizing those who refuse to be a part...

Swiss consumer price inflation remain lowest compared to Eurozone and U.S. Swiss consumer price inflation remain the lowest in comparison with different countries in the euro zone and the United States. Consumer prices in the U.S. are driven by rising health care costs and asset price inflation in shelter. In Europe, we see the opposite phenomenon: Rents in Italy or Spain are steady or falling. In Germany and...

Swiss Franc EUR/CHF - Euro Swiss Franc, December 06(see more posts on EUR/CHF - Euro Swiss Franc, ) - Click to enlarge FX Rates The foreign exchange market is quiet. Ranges are narrow, with the US dollar mostly consolidating against the major currencies. Given the push lower yesterday, the shallowness of its recovery warns of the greenback’s downside correction after strong gains last month may not be...

 See the introduction and the video for the terms gold basis, co-basis, backwardation and contango. A Plethora of Reasons We’ve gone through a succession of events and processes that were supposed to make gold go up. The following list is by no means exhaustive: Quantitative Easing Bernanke’s Helicopter Drops Janet Yellen’s Keynesianism Obama’s Deficits (US government debt is now a hair away from $20,000,000,000—and...

A Very Odd Growth Spurt in the True Money Supply The growth rates of various “Austrian” measures of the US money supply (such as TMS-2 and money AMS) have accelerated significantly in recent months.  That is quite surprising, as the Fed hasn’t been engaged in QE for quite some time and year-on-year growth in commercial bank credit has actually slowed down rather than accelerating of late. The only exception to this is...

Dollar-yen has been driven by the sharp rise in US bond yields. There are some (dollar) bearish divergences in the JPY/USD technicals. US 10-year yields may also be putting in a near-term top. Since the US election nearly a month ago, the Japanese yen has been the weakest performing major currency. It has fallen 7.5% against the US dollar. At the risk of oversimplifying, there is one major drag on the yen, and that...

Summary: The Dollar Index’s technical tone has deteriorated. It is corresponding to the easing of US rates and a narrowing differential. The risk is that the correction can continue in the coming days. We took a closer look at the US Dollar Index last week. In our write up, we noted highlighted the importance of the 100.60 area. We warned that a break of that support could signal the start of a deeper...