Tag Archives: 3) Swiss Markets and News

Sommaruga (left) met representatives of more than ten tourist associations on Sunday. (Keystone/Anthony Anex) Hopes have been raised of a re-opening of tourist facilities, including restaurants, in Switzerland in June as part of the government’s exit strategy from the coronavirus restrictions. President Simonetta Sommaruga said the government would examine options, coordinated with the tourist industry, by mid-May. “There are a number of options. I think it is...

Marcel Ospel (1950-2020). (Keystone/eddy Risch) Ospel, who was ousted from his job as chairman of UBS in 2008 after fallout from the US subprime mortgage crisis, passed away on Sunday due to cancer. Born in Basel in 1950, Ospel began his career in 1977 with the Swiss Bank Corporation, an investment bank, before later engineering its merger with UBS in 1998. Having become chairman in 2001, the beginning of his tenure was marked by the controversial grounding of the...

(© Keystone / Gaetan Bally) The number of reports of suspected money laundering jumped by about 25% in Switzerland last year. According to the Federal Money Laundering Reporting Officeexternal link, 7,705 reports were filed in 2019, compared to 6,126 the previous year. The office was able to process 4,074 of these reports last year, and forwarded about half (2,024) to the law enforcement agencies, as it stated in its annual reportexternal link published on Thursday....

A shortage of frozen butter in Switzerland has the industry wanting to import 1,000 tons. Dairy farmers disagree. On Thursday an umbrella groupexternal link for the dairy sector announced that it had applied to the federal authorities for permission to import 1,000 tons of butter. There are currently 1,500 tons of frozen butter reserves in Switzerland, but the nation would need 4,000-5,000 tons to get through the demand for the rest of the year, says the group....

 © Miriam Doerr | Dreamstime.com As Switzerland moves towards easing Covid-19 social restrictions, some fear the virus will get away again. A key part of containing the spread is testing. One way to evaluate how comprehensive testing is is to look at positivity, the percentage of tests that are positive. Imagine the population were a jar of jelly beans, the testing a scoop, and the red jelly beans in the scoop positives. Positivity would be the percentage of red...

Many people in Switzerland will be counting their change more carefully. (© Keystone / Christian Beutler) In a revised forecast in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, federal authorities predict GDP will contract by 6.7% in 2020 and recover slowly in 2021. On Thursday, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) announced that it had adjusted 2020 economic forecasts to take into account sporting events affected by the pandemic. The original revised forecast...

A drone is used to determine the quality of the grass, pictured at the Swiss Future Farm, a demonstration farm for smart-farming technologies. (© Keystone / Gaetan Bally) Remote sensing, big data, artificial intelligence and robotics are being integrated into everyday farm management. Based on information relayed by a Swiss start-up, the owner of a sugar mill in India tells local cane farmers it’s almost time to harvest their crop. The information provided to the...

© Absolut_photos | Dreamstime.com Switzerland’s Covid-19 death rate has been lower than much of the rest of Europe. A lower infection rate among older people appears to be one reason. The rates of deaths among those either recovering or dying have been particularly high in Belgium (40%), France (34%) and Italy (31%). In other countries such as Austria (4%), Germany (5%) and Switzerland (7%) they have been much lower. There are many reasons for variations in these...

Switzerland is home to some of the world’s most important gold refineries. The Swiss authorities say they regularly monitor the origin and transactions of this metal to ensure that they are legal and transparent. (Keystone / Martin Ruetschi) Venezuela is illegally mining and trading in gold, and Switzerland could be one of its clients, according to Swiss media reports. swissinfo.ch spoke to law enforcement, customs and financial authorities to find out whether they...

A journalist attends a Covid-19 briefing at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva on March 6. WHO has played a leading role in fighting the virus, amid criticism. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone) The pandemic is testing the limits of the United Nations system, say Geneva and New York-based experts, amid funding challenges and an ongoing blame game between the United States and China. The UN is marking its 75th anniversaryexternal link this year. What could have...