SNB & CHF

Overview: The jump in US interest rates helped lift the greenback to new 20-year highs against the Japanese yen and pushed the euro back below $1.07. US equities saw initially strong gains pared and this set the tone for today’s activity. Most of the equity markets in the Asia Pacific region fell, but Japan and China. Europe’s Stoxx 600 is giving back more than half of yesterday’s 0.9% gain. US futures are off about 0.5%. The US 10-year yield is off a couple of...

Hailed as pioneers of synth-pop and techno music and still filling halls in the wake of a career spanning four decades, the Zurich duo has just won the Swiss Grand Award for Music. Speaking to SWI swissinfo.ch, they explain the secret to success: not to care about success at all. Boris Blank is the musical brains, but he confesses that he can’t read a score. Dieter Meier is the singer who learned how to sing on the job. Together they are Yello, probably the most globally successful...

May 2022’s payroll estimates weren’t quite the level of downshift President Phillips had warned about, though that’s increasingly likely just a matter of time. In fact, despite the headline Establishment Survey monthly change being slightly better than expected, it and even more so the other employment data all still show an unmistakable slowdown in the labor market. What’s left open for argument and concern is now a matter of how much of a downside there might end...

On 2 June 2022, Switzerland’s parliament adopted two motions to accelerate the adoption of solar panels. Photo by Los Muertos Crew on Pexels.com The first motion aimed to allow private individuals to earn better returns on the electricity they produce. Under the proposal they would be able to sell electricity to other individuals, municipalities and cantons without paying heavy network charges. 140 versus 48 voted in favour of this plan. A second change compels the...

There was a time when the advocates of socialism argued that it would lead man to material abundance, whereas free-market capitalism would lead only to increasing misery and would ultimately collapse under its own internal stresses. You don’t hear that too much these days, and for good reason. A century of empirical evidence has shown the contrary—that the free market leads to increasing wealth and material freedom, while socialism leads us only to poverty, state...

Finland and Sweden’s recent decision to apply for North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership is a major win for the military alliance, but a far more dubious one for these two countries. NATO badly needs a success at this moment, since neither the economic war on Russia nor the conflict in Ukraine seems to be going the West’s way. Whether officially adding two more Nordic countries would have a real military advantage for NATO remains to be seen, but at least it...

The more kafkaesque quagmires you’ve slogged through, the more you hope “pay-to-play for the rest of us” beomes ubiquitous. You know how “pay-to-play” works: contribute a couple of million dollars to key political players, and then get your tax break, subsidy, no-bid contract, etc., slipped into some nook or cranny of the legislative process that few (if any) will notice because the legislation is hundreds of pages long or a “gut and replace” magic wand was wielded...

It has become a familiar sight over the past decade and a half: a supposedly venerable member of the financial elite tells us with utmost calm that what we think we are seeing isn’t really all that bad. The Fed already knows all about it and has already taken all necessary steps. Further, they are monitoring the situation closely and are ready to make any necessary adjustments with ease and alacrity. Reading the Fed’s meeting minutes and picking through its actual...

Overall, in 2021, Swiss salaries shrunk by 0.2% in nominal terms and by 0.8% in real terms, given an annual rate of inflation of 0.6% across the year, reported the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) this week. Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.comHowever, when broken down, women saw an overall increase in pay of 0.6% while men on average saw pay fall by 0.7%. The difference reflects differences in the type of work undertaken by men and women. Pay for public sector...

If you’ve purchased any airline tickets lately, you’ve probably noticed that prices are up. It’s quite a reversal from the days of covid lockdowns, when airline tickets could be had for half the price of 2019 fares. Or even lower, in many cases. But those days are apparently over, and as Yahoo Finance notes this week: Airline fares soared 18.6% in April, according to the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)…. The jump,...