SNB & CHF

Despite banks, broadly speaking, having a banner year in 2020 as central-bank-liquidity more-than-washed over the losses due to COVID and policy restrictions, banker bonuses have come under pressure. In Europe, the picture is more uncertain as banks’ performance has been mixed. Credit Suisse wound up reducing its bonus pool by about 7%. Back in December 2020, Credit Suisse CEO Thomas Gottstein blamed the cuts on social responsibility, stating that “it’s too early to...

We do not like Purchasing Power or Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER) as measurement for currencies. For us, the trade balance decides if a currency is overvalued. Only the trade balance can express productivity gains, while the REER assumes constant productivity in comparison to trade partners. Who has read Michael Pettis, knows that a rising trade surplus may also be caused by a higher savings rate while the trade partners decided to spend more. This is partially...

One question I get often is how to file taxes with stocks and dividends. And this especially gets popular when we add foreign stocks and foreign dividends into the mix. Many people are afraid of investing because they think it will make it complicated to file your taxes. But in practice, it is not complicated to file your taxes even with a large ETF portfolio. In this article, we will see how to file your taxes with Swiss Stocks and dividends, which is very simple....

The offside of “synchronized” is pretty obvious when you consider all possibilities. In economic terms, synchronized growth would mean if the bulk of the economy starts moving forward, we’d expect the rest to follow with only a slight lag. That’s the upside of harmonized systems, the period everyone hopes and cheers for. What happens, however, when it’s the leaders rather than laggards who begin to shift toward the other way? It’s a question the global economy has...

A gentleman who does work for us sent me a text recently saying the price of his supplies has increased 20 percent, so he wants to increase his monthly fee 10 percent. It was a nice way to ask, and I said sure, especially given that he’s willing to take a haircut on his labor to make the increase more palatable. Chairman Jerome Powell would be happy to hear this story, as the Federal Reserve prints mightily to push the CPI (Consumer Price Index) to 2 percent and...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.05% to 1.1027 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, March 2(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: A warning from China’s top banking regulator about the frothiness of foreign markets appeared to blunt the knock-on effect of yesterday’s largest rise in the S&P 500 since last June (~2.4%) and weighed on global equities. The large markets in the Asia Pacific region but India and...

The Japanese robot “Pepper”, which Lexi is based on, is used in schools, hotels and businesses. © Keystone / Urs Flueeler Covid-19 has accelerated the transition to online teaching, raising questions about the role of robots in classrooms. Switzerland is rolling out its own robot learning programs, but it’s still a long way off before they will replace teachers. “Hi everyone, I’m Lexi”, a humanoid robot greets a full house at the University of St Gallen. Sabine...

Any economy stupid enough to rely on the insane distortions of GDP “growth” as its primary measure will richly deserve a Darwin Award when it inevitably collapses in a putrid heap of squandered resources and capital. We’re told the gross domestic product (GDP) measures growth, but what it really measures is waste: capital, labor and resources that are squandered and then mislabeled “growth” for PR purposes. If we only manage what we measure, then we’re mismanaging...

Over the last few weeks we’ve been witnessing a historic surge in the Bitcoin price, a seemingly unstoppable ride that the mainstream media headlines can hardly keep up with. Especially following the news that Elon Musks’ Tesla bought $1.5 in the cryptocurrency, sending it to new record highs, most of the media coverage appears to be focused on all the wrong things. Part fear-mongering over the many “risks” of bitcoin, part pleading for governments to step in and...

Bund und Kantone kommen in den Genuss einer auf 6 Mrd. Fr. erhöhten Ausschüttung. (Bild: Shutterstock.com/Marekusz) Auch wenn der Gewinn 2020 der SNB von 20,9 Mrd. Fr. nicht an den Vorjahreswert von 48,9 Mrd. Fr. heranreicht, ist es im historischen Vergleich ein überdurchschnittliches, ja sehr üppiges Resultat. Der Gewinn der SNB korreliert stark mit dem Verlauf an den Finanzmärkten, und deren freundlicher Verlauf trug der Nationalbank auch im vergangenen Jahr hohe...