SNB & CHF

Red Bull buys about 25% of the sugar produced in Switzerland, resulting in reported savings for the company of up to CHF10 million (© Keystone / Christian Beutler) The makers of sweet products benefit from the federal subsidies paid to sugar beet farmers in Switzerland. The price of sugar in Switzerland has been on the decline for years. As a result, 400 farmers have quit producing it in recent years. Sugar beet producers receive annual subsidies amounting to CHF36...

If you have a connection to Switzerland through your family or your partner and want to make it official by becoming Swiss yourself – this is how you can go about it. The Swiss passport can seem difficult to get. In this 'Switzerland Explained' video we describe how to kickstart the application process if you're living abroad and how to find out if you’re eligible for a fast-track application procedure. There are three ways of becoming...

Sponsored link anchor: transferring money from Switzerland to UK Trade between the UK and Switzerland is robust these days and it’s not going to get any worse for a long time. Even with the economic turmoil resulting from Brexit, the trade between these two countries was set to stay strong due to the special deal signed by them in 2019. As the situation stands now, trade agreements are solid, so these business relationships should only strengthen. Of course, this...

If you have a connection to Switzerland through your family or your partner and want to make it official by becoming Swiss yourself – this is how you can go about it. The Swiss passport can seem difficult to get. In this 'Switzerland Explained' video we describe how to kickstart the application process if you're living abroad and how to find out if you’re eligible for a fast-track application procedure. There are three ways of becoming Swiss: by birth (having a Swiss parent), marrying a...

04.03.2020 – The consumer price index (CPI) increased by 0.1% in February 2020 compared with the previous month, reaching 101.6 points (December 2015 = 100). Inflation was –0.1% compared with the same month of the previous year. These are the results of the Federal Statistical Office (FSO).The 0.1% increase compared with the previous month can be explained by several factors including rising prices for air transport. International package holidays also recorded an...

USD/CHF bounces off 23-month low amid oversold RSI. January/February bottoms could restrict immediate upside. An eight-day-old falling trend line adds to the resistance. February 2018 top seems to be on the Bears’ radar. USD/CHF recovers 0.11% from the lowest since September 2018 amid the pre-Europe session on Wednesday. With the RSI conditions oversold, the quote seems to extend the pullback towards the lows marked during January and February months of the current...

The Federal Reserve this morning slashed the target federal funds rate by 0.5 percent today. According to CNBC: The Federal Reserve moved to an enact an emergency interest rate cut after officials saw the coronavirus having a material impact on the economic outlook, Chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday. Powell held a news conference following the central bank’s decision to cut overnight interest rates by half a percentage point. He said the Fed “saw a risk to the...

Well, that wasn’t he had in mind. The whole point of a rate cut, any rate cut let alone an emergency fifty, is to signal especially the stock market that the Fed is in the business of…something. The public has been led, by and large, to assume that something good happens when the Fed Chair shows up on TV. If you ask anyone to be specific, however, they can’t really answer you beyond the primitive superstition of low rates being especially beneficial to borrowers....

Once confidence and certainty are lost, the willingness to expand debt and leverage collapses. Even though the first-order effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are still impossible to predict, it’s already possible to ask: did the pandemic pop all the global financial bubbles? The reason we can ask this question is the entire bull mania of the 21st century has been based on a permanently high rate of expansion of leverage and debt. The lesson of the 2008-09 Global...

The new coronavirus that originated in China, apparently first detected in December, emerged on the world’s stage in January and continues to dominate the investment climate. There are two critical questions for investors and businesses whose answers will likely be clearer in the first part of March. First, will Covid-19 be contained for the most part by the end of Q1? China altered its methodology a couple of times, and many observers questioned the quality of the...