SNB & CHF

The dollar was surprisingly resilient last week; we look for further dollar gains ahead It is a holiday shortened week in the US, but there are still some major data releases There is a fair amount of eurozone data this week; UK Prime Minister Johnson unveiled his Tory manifesto Hong Kong held local elections this weekend; tensions between Japan and Korea appear to have eased, but questions remain The dollar was surprisingly resilient last week.  Despite the lack of...

The money supply growth rate rose in October, climbing to a twenty-eight-month high. The last time the growth rate was higher was during July of 2017, when the growth rate was 5.07 percent. During October 2019, year-over-year growth in the money supply was at 4.95 percent. That’s up from September’s rate of 3.10 percent, and was up from October 2018’s rate of 3.49 percent. The increase in money-supply growth in October represents a sizable reversal of the trend...

Operation Car Wash began in March 2014 as an investigation into allegations that executives at Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras had accepted bribes from construction firms in return for awarding them contracts at inflated prices. (Keystone / Antonio Lacerda) Swiss investigators have executed searches at the Geneva offices of commodity traders Vitol and Trafigura at the request of Brazilian federal prosecutors as part of Brazil’s Lava Jato [Car Wash] corruption...

The amount of electricity consumed in Switzerland has fallen by 6.4% over the past 19 years Switzerland is on track to meet its short-term greener energy goals, but the government warns that more work needs to be done to meet more ambitious mid-term targets by 2035. The alpine country plans to be carbon neutral by 2050. On Thursday, the Federal Office of Energyexternal link released its second report that monitors national energy consumption and its effect on the...

Scarcely a week will go by without some grand prediction of the dollar being dethroned. Set aside how if anything is to be deposed it would have to be the eurodollar, these stories typically follow the same formulaic approach: Country X is moving away from dollar reserves, “diversifying” its holdings because of the geopolitics of Y. Usually, it is the Chinese who are set to play the role of upstart. It makes sense. As the world’s second largest national economy...

All doctrines that have sought to discover in the course of human history some definite trend in the sequence of changes have disagreed, in reference to the past, with the historically established facts and where they tried to predict the future have been spectacularly proved wrong by later events. Most of these doctrines were characterized by reference to a state of perfection in human affairs. They placed this perfect state either at the beginning of history or at...

Ueli Maurer reviews guards during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on April 29 (Keystone / Madoka Ikegami / Pool) Ueli Maurer, who holds the rotating Swiss presidency this year, was set to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday. It is Maurer’s fourth foreign visit this year that has raised eyebrows in Switzerland. Most controversial was his trip in October to Saudi Arabia, which had already been postponed after the...

[embedded content] On November 19, 1999, after eight years of construction, the Vereina Tunnel opened in eastern Switzerland. Connecting the Landquart – Davos Platz and the Bever – Scuol-Tarasp lines, the tunnel is 19 kilometres long and the journey through takes 18 minutes. In 20 years, it has brought various improvements to locals, tourists, and businesses. However, its construction had initially been opposed by some as it was feared that the tunnel would lead to...

Even though it was a stunning turn of events, the move was widely celebrated. The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee, the FOMC, hadn’t been scheduled to meet until the end of that month. And yet, Alan Greenspan didn’t want to wait. The “maestro”, still at the height of his reputation, was being pressured to live up to it. The Fed had begun to cut rates. In Austin, Texas, where President-elect Bush and many prominent business leaders were gathered, the news...

What’s been normalized are policies and cultural norms that seek to enrich and protect the few at the expense of the many. When the initially extraordinary fades into the unremarkable background of everyday life, we say it’s been normalized. Put another way, we quickly habituate to new conditions, and rationalize our ready acceptance of what was previously unacceptable. Technology offers many examples of extraordinary advances quickly becoming normalized as we...