SNB & CHF

The week ahead is chock full of data, including Japan, the UK, and Australia's CPI. The UK and Australia report on the labor market. The US, UK, and Canada also report retail sales. The early Fed surveys from New York and Philadelphia for January will be released. China's December data are due, and it is also expected to report its estimate of Q4 GDP, where some economists forecast a contraction. While headline risk is associated with these economic reports, we...

You’re more likely to die of heart disease than anything else, partly because, well, if nothing else gets you, your heart will give out. And a heart attack could cost you upwards of $760,000 these days, when you consider hospital charges, prescription drugs, additional care for the rest of your life, and then indirect costs like loss of time at work. Up to 80 percent of premature heart disease can be prevented simply by the adoption of a healthy diet, regular...

Given the U.S. government’s increasing financial difficulties, we can expect extremely vicious behavior on the part of federal officials to bring money into the regime. What U.S. officials are currently doing to Russian billionaires provides a clue as to what they are likely to do Americans as the federal government’s financial situation worsens. The federal government is spending more than $1 trillion per year than it is bringing in with taxes. That means...

Inversions are relatively simple once you're freed from the Fed's cult. Policymakers want to hike rates for reasons market participants believe are all wrong. The more inverted, the more strongly the belief. With inflation #s coming down, we have to ask why and how those fit into what we've observed into markets. Recent data offers more compelling evidence. Eurodollar University's Money & Macro Analysis Twitter: https://twitter.com/JeffSnider_AIP https://www.eurodollar.university...

On 9 January 2023, Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) published the latest figures for the Swiss labor market in 2022 showing unemployment at its lowest rate for 20 years. Photo by Anamul Rezwan on Pexels.com2022 saw the development of a labour market increasingly characterised by a shortage of workers and an unemployment rate of 2.1%, said SECO. The unemployment rate fell 0.5 percentage points from 2.6% in 2021 to its lowest in 20 years....

By international standards, unemployment payments are generous in Switzerland – typically 70% of salary. But they come with strict requirements for recipients to show they are engaging in actions deemed necessary to find work. With record numbers of unfilled jobs, pressure is now being put on some to change career, reported RTS. Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.comAccording to one report, there are more than 100,000 unfilled jobs in Switzerland. At the same time...

Federal-Reserve-Gebäude im April 2022. Den Notenbankern gehen allmählich die Argumente für weitere Zinsschritte aus. Das meinen die Ökonomen des Versicherungskonzerns Swiss Life und sagen deshalb für die USA, die Eurozone und die Schweiz nur noch leichte Zinserhöhungen voraus. Konkret erwartet Swiss-Life-Asset-Managers-Chefökonom Marc Brütsch von der Schweizerischen Nationalbank (SNB) im Frühling nur noch eine Erhöhung des Leitzinses um 0,25 Prozentpunkte auf 1,25...

Overview: The continued easing of US price pressures has strengthened the market's conviction that the Federal Reserve will further slow the pace of rate hikes and that the terminal rate will be near 5.0%. The decline in US rates has removed a key support for the US dollar, which has fallen against all the G10 currencies this week. The Dollar Index has now retraced half of what it gained since bottoming on January 6, 2021. Meanwhile, there are positive developments...

The monetary regime in power now—the so-called 2 percent inflation standard—is promising us a “return to normal” after the great pandemic and war inflation of 2021–22. At this time of powerful propaganda—the dismal accompaniment of natural disaster and war—we should be on our guard against such messaging. Even more so when we consider the success of this regime in repudiating blame for the great asset inflation culminating in the global financial crisis of 2008,...

Anyone who has decided to buy gold, or follows the gold price will be aware of how powerful the US Federal Reserve is. This year the Federal Reserve will turn 110 years old, only in recent years is dollar hegemony appearing to falter. Below we look at the central bank’s origins and three lessons we can learn from the history of the world’s most powerful bank, in order to help our investment decisions in 2023.  Is the FED’s institutional history about to repeat...