SNB & CHF

© Pongmoji | Dreamstime.com COVID-19 has hit the world fast and we are racing to understand it, while struggling to come to terms with its deadly impact. When trying to estimate the impact, it is tempting to take the current number of deaths and divide it by the number of reported cases. However, the resulting percentage is meaningless. Here’s why: Jumping the gun If we divide the current number of deaths in South Korea with the current number of cases so far we get...

The coronavirus has spread to 173 countries as of March 19. (Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) The upheaval caused by the coronavirus, Covid-19, is all around us. And I know many are anxious, worried and confused. That’s absolutely natural. We are facing a health threat unlike any other in our lifetimes. Meanwhile, the virus is spreading, the danger is growing, and our health systems, economies and day-to-day lives are being severely tested....

Economic fluctuations, also known as business cycles, are seen as being driven by mysterious forces that are difficult to identify. Finn Kydland and Edward C. Prescott (KP), the 2004 Nobel laureates in economics, decided to attempt to find out what these forces were.1 They hypothesized that technology shocks are a major factor behind economic fluctuations and demonstrated that a technology-induced shock can explain 70 percent of the fluctuations in the postwar US...

Exponential Growth and Corona The more mathematically versed folks under us have understood that it the slope (or steepness / derivation) of the Corona expansion curve is important. The following statistics is based on the Worldometer data, that rather shows the “first dimension”; we however, focus on the “second dimension”, the slope of the curve. This is far more useful, because for such exponential curve, the slope is key.The video explains the details....

[caption id="attachment_439311" align="alignleft" width="400"] SNB chairman Thomas Jordan said the central bank will continue to defend the franc. (Keystone / Marcel Bieri)[/caption] The Swiss National Bank (SNB) has kept interest rates unchanged at -0.75% but is easing the burden on commercial banks. The SNB said on Thursday that it is also intervening on the foreign exchange markets to keep the franc from appreciating too far, too fast. The SNB’s...

Efforts are underway to provide additional medical devices and beds in intensive care units in Ticino. (Keystone/Alessandro Crinari) The Swiss health authorities have raised alarm over the limited care facilities in one of its regions hardest hit by the coronavirus epidemic. “The situation in Ticino is dramatic,” said Daniel Koch of the Federal Office of Public Health at a news conference on Thursday. He said it was foreseeable that the hospitals in canton Ticino,...

The grounding of the fleets of many airlines is symptomatic of the crisis.  (© Keystone / Christian Beutler) The global banking industry is demanding regulators relax or delay a raft of post-crisis rules on everything from capital and liquidity to accounting and climate change, which they argue are hampering their ability to respond to the coronavirus crisis. Executives have launched the globally co-ordinated push to convince supervisors including the Bank of...

Forward-looking data is starting to trickle in. Germany has been a main area of interest for us right from the beginning, and by beginning I mean Euro$ #4 rather than just COVID-19. What has happened to the German economy has ended up happening everywhere else, a true bellwether especially manufacturing and industry. The latest sentiment figures from ZEW as well as IFO are sobering. Taking the former first, it had been quite buoyant last year on the false...

An der Börse wirds heiss und die Panik verbreitet sich, Panikverkäufe sind mittlerweile an der Tagesordnung. Wir können bereits von einem Crash sprechen, ausgelöst vom Coronavirus. Es ist für viele so auch mich der erste Crash den wir aktiv investiert miterleben. Wir müssen diese Situation nutzen um möglichst viel zu lernen. Was ist mit den Investoren los? Wo sind die langfristigen Buy & Hold Investoren geblieben, auf einmal versucht sich jeder im Markettiming...

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” -Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff from 2009 to 2010. Only a couple of weeks ago, if anyone told you that your entire country would be basically shutting down, that events and public gatherings would be outlawed, that you’d be looking at empty shelves in your local supermarket and that the global stock market would...