SNB & CHF

Buy gold and silver to hedge risks in 2020. IG interview Mark O’Byrne of GoldCore With late cycle risks and concerns about global growth, many Wall Street analysts are increasingly bullish on gold. Mark O’Byrne, founder at GoldCore spoke to IGTV’s Victoria Scholar about the outlook for gold in 2020. He explained why most analysts including GoldCore are optimistic on both gold and silver. He also tells IGTV why he thinks palladium is looking overvalued in the near...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.01% to 1.0893 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, December 19(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: It is risky to read too much into the price action in holiday-thin markets, but inflation fears are beginning to surface. The price of January WTI is around $61, having tested $50 a barrel in Q3. The CRB Index made new highs for the year yesterday and is up almost 9% for the year....

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...

USD/CHF trades near the multi-month low. A Bullish technical formation, oversold RSI conditions stop sellers. The further downside can look towards late-August month low. USD/CHF seesaws around 0.9800 during the pre-European session on Thursday. The pair forms a bullish technical pattern on the four-hour (4H) chart. Also supporting the hopeful buyers is oversold conditions of 14-bar Relative Strength Index (RSI). Even so, a sustained break of the bullish pattern’s...

Rail accidents are rare in Switzerland (© Keystone / Urs Flueeler) There has been a fall in the number of accidents and fatalities on the Swiss railways, according to new national figures. On Tuesday, the Federal Statistical Office reported a total of 70 rail accidents and 14 deaths in 2018. This is the lowest number of annual fatalities since 2011.  In the 2000s there were between 200 and 282 reported accidents each year and 20-40 deaths, excluding suicides on the...

Poverty may not always be visible, but it affects some 100,000 children in Switzerland. (Keystone) Although Switzerland is rich, poverty within the country continues to rise, says a report released on Tuesday. Poverty affected 675,000 people including 100,000 children in 2017, a 10% increase on the previous year, according to the reportexternal link (in French) by the non-governmental organisation Caritasexternal link. In 2014, poverty affected 6.7% of the population...

While sentiment has been at best mixed about the direction of the US economy the past few months, the European economy cannot even manage that much. Its most vocal proponent couldn’t come up with much good to say about it – while he was on his way out the door. At his final press conference as ECB President on October 24, Mario Draghi had to acknowledge (sort of) how he is leaving quite the mess for Christine Lagarde. Incoming data since the meeting in September...

In my days before I worked for the Mises Institute, I had a colleague who knew I associated with Austrian-School economists. In the wake of the bailouts and quantitative easing that followed the 2008 financial crisis, he’d sometimes crack “where’s all that inflation you Austrians keep talking about?” But then, in the very same conversation, he’d remark with dismay on how much housing-price increases had outpaced household income in the region. He didn’t need an...

The risks of a hard Brexit are perhaps higher than markets appreciated. Here, we set forth some possible scenarios as to what may unfold after the January 31 deadline. Uncertainty is likely to be protracted and markets hate uncertainty. As such, we see UK assets continuing to underperform. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS Fears of a hard Brexit are still alive and well.  Prime Minister Johnson is pushing to guarantee a Brexit by end-2020 even if a new trade arrangement is not in...

By Daniel R. Amerman, CFA As can be seen in the graph above, for the last 12 weeks there has been a stunning visual correlation between the yellow bars of the total weekly funding of deficits by the Federal Reserve, and the green bars of the weekly deficit spending by the United States government. Total deficit spending, the extent to which monies spent by the federal government exceeded taxes collected, was a staggering $422 billion in just the last 12 weeks. In...