SNB & CHF

EM has been able to get some traction as markets basically shrugged off the risk-off sentiment after the Iran attacks. This week’s planned signing of the Phase One trade deal should help boost EM further, but we remain cautious. The Iran situation is by no means solved, and we see periodic bouts of risk-off sentiment coming from smaller skirmishes. The World Bank also sounded a warning bell last week with its downward revisions to its global growth forecasts....

Zurich, 10 January 2020 – The Board of Directors of UBS Group AG announced today that it will nominate Nathalie Rachou and Mark Hughes for election to the Board at the Annual General Meeting on 29 April, 2020. David Sidwell and Isabelle Romy will not stand for re-election. David Sidwell will have completed a twelve year term of office and Isabelle Romy has decided to step down after eight years on the UBS Board. Nathalie Rachou (born 1957) has been a member of the...

Early bird WEF delegates will be learning about blockchain in the ski resort of St Moritz. (Keystone / Martin Ruetschi) Global politicians, regulators, financiers and technology pioneers will soon be gathering in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. This has not been lost on the blockchain and crypto industry, which is redoubling efforts to engage with policy makers. Next week’s Crypto Finance Conferenceexternal link (CfC), in the up-market ski resort of St...

A meeting a a regional job centre, or RAV, in German, here in Thun (staged picture) (© Keystone / Gaetan Bally) The Swiss unemployment rate fell to 2.3% in 2019, according to the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO). That’s the lowest yearly rate for almost 20 years. SECO said in a statementexternal link on Friday that 106,932 people were registered with regional job centres in 2019, 9.5% less than in the previous year. The only blip: the rate rose to a...

Discussions about the incentive effects of taxes can be misleading. The focus is usually on the tax rates imposed. But one’s incentives are not best measured by tax rates, but by how much value created for others (reflected in consumers’ willingness to pay) is retained by the creator, which I refer to as take-home income. These two variables — tax rates and take-home income — are reciprocal in the sense that the higher the marginal tax rate, the smaller the take-home...

Dank der hohen Ausschüttungsreserve stellt die Nationalbank zusätzliche Ausschüttungen an Bund und Kantone in Aussicht. Die Schweizerische Nationalbank (SNB) wird für das Geschäftsjahr 2019 nach provisorischen Berechnungen einen Gewinn in der Grössenordnung von 49 Mrd. Franken ausweisen. Wie die SNB am Donnerstag mitteilte, entfiel der Löwenanteil des Gewinns mit rund 40 Mrd. Franken auf Fremdwährungspositionen. Auf dem Goldbestand resultierte ein Bewertungsgewinn...

The Fed announced on Thursday it is adding another 83 billion in "in temporary liquidity to financial markets" And, in a development that will surprise no cynic anywhere, the Fed also noted it "may keep adding temporary money to markets for longer than policy makers had expected in September." Specifically, this was another move to shore up and bailout the repo market, which has required the Fed's ongoing revival of quantitative easing (but don't call it...

It will be Trump’s first trip outside the US since becoming only the third American president to be impeached (Keystone) US President Donald Trump plans to attend the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos this month, making up for an appearance he cancelled during last year’s US government shutdown. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham confirmed on Wednesday that Trump would attend the annual forumexternal...

I’m going to go back to Mexico for the third day in a row. First it was imports (meaning Mexico’s exports) then automobile manufacturing and now Industrial Production. I’ll probably come back to this tomorrow when INEGI updates that last number for November 2019. For now, through October will do just fine, especially in light of where automobile production is headed (ICYMI, off the bottom of the charts). Mexico is, as I’ve been writing this week, the presumed...

Christine Lagarde. Photo Credit: European Parliament On December 12, Christine Lagarde introduced her goals and vision in her first rate-setting meeting as the new President of the ECB. On the actual policy front, there were no surprises. She remained committed to the path set by her predecessor, Mario Draghi, and kept the current monetary stimulus unchanged. The central bank kept its deposit rate at the present record-low -0.5%, and pledged to continue its €20...