SNB & CHF

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights Innovation is one of the keys to business success. The world is changing at such a pace, and your customers’ preferences are changing so fast, that your business has to change at the same speed, or even faster. How to keep up is a part of the entrepreneurial challenge. Mark Packard has a big insight about how entrepreneurs manage innovation. Producers don’t innovate. Customers do. That may sound a little odd, but Mark’s Value...

Since the beginning of the year, the corona crisis has monopolized news coverage to the extent that a lot of very important stories and developments either went underreported or were ignored altogether. One such example was the very surprising ruling that came out of the German Constitutional Court in early May, which challenged the actions and remit of the European Central Bank (ECB). In essence, the court’s decision made it clear that the ECB’s quantitative easing...

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by 0.28% to 1.0707 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, June 11(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: Many observers are attributing the sell-off in risk assets today to the Federal Reserve’s pessimistic outlook, yet, as we note below, the Fed’s median GDP forecast this year is better than many international agency forecasts, including the OECD’s that was issued yesterday. Moreover,...

The controversial issue of e-voting is back: Swiss Post, which had halted the development of a project in July 2019, has bought a Spanish-owned system and plans to propose a platform ready for testing by 2021. Opposition to the plans of Swiss Post remains strong. The purchase was reported on May 17 by the SonntagsBlick newspaper, who wrote that the deal between Swiss Post and Spanish firm Scytl had been settled for an unspecified amount. The deal follows the...

Restrictions imposed to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, such as store closures, will have a major impact on Swiss GDP in 2020, the OECD predicts. Keystone / Laurent Gillieron Even though restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of Covid-19 were less strict than in other countries, Switzerland will still see its GDP fall by 7.7%, if the pandemic is contained by summer. Gross domestic product will not rebound until 2021, according to the forecast published by the...

The FOMC decision comes out this afternoon and we expect a dovish hold; this would of course be negative for the dollar Ahead of the decision, May CPI will be reported; the budget statement will be of interest; Brazil reports May IPCA inflation We are still getting mixed messages about Europe’s flagship €750 bln recovery package; French April IP fell -20.1% m/m Japan reported weak May PPI and April core machine orders; Australia reported mixed sentiment indicators;...

The dollar has stabilized a bit; Friday’s US jobs data could be a game changer The US bond market selloff continues; for now, the weak dollar trend is hard to fight The Brazilian government has found a way to make a bad situation worse by trying to control its Covid-19 statistics German IP came in a bit worse than expected at -17.9% m/m; the OPEC+ deal ended with the expected supply cut deal, lending continued support to crude prices Japan Q1 GDP revised higher on...

James Rickards holds a gold bar in a vault near Zurich, Switzerland. The bar is a so-called LBMA “good delivery” bar which weigh 400 ounces (over 99.9% purity), and is worth about $700,000 at current market prices. In 1971 it was worth $14,000. ◆ WHY GOLD? That’s a question I’m asked frequently. It’s usually followed by a comment along the lines of, “I don’t get it. It’s just a shiny rock. People dig it out of the ground and then put it back in the ground. What’s the...