Tag Archives: 3) Swiss Markets and News

The pool of Swiss IT specialists is almost dry © Keystone / Christian Beutler The Swiss economy has recovered well from the Covid-19 crisis, but despite the free movement of people agreement with the EU, some sectors are struggling to recruit qualified staff, says a government report. The unemployment rate in spring 2022 returned to its pre-pandemic level for both Swiss and foreign employees, according to the 18th report of the Observatory on the Free Movement of...

Even before high inflation hit people’s pockets many Swiss households were over extended. In 2020, almost one in six residents lived in a household with debt arrears, according to data released this week by the Federal Statistical Office (FSO). Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com The most common overdue payments were taxes (7.5%), health insurance premiums (5.5%), phone bills (4.1%), utility bills (3.4%), credit cards and other loans (2.7%) and rent or mortgage payments...

Authorities have raised the spectre of winter rationing, should supplies be disrupted. © Keystone / Christian Beutler The president of the Swissgas industry platform says Switzerland is not aware of how fragile the situation is and that “it would not take much” to lead to a winter shortage. André Dosé told the External linkNeue Zürcher ZeitungExternal link (NZZ) newspaper on Thursday that looming gas shortages elsewhere in Europe and exploding prices amounted to a...

Photo by Ahmed Muntasir on Pexels.com On 4 July 2022, Switzerland’s Federal Statistical Office (FSO) published June inflation data, which show prices 3.4% higher than one year ago, well above the Swiss National Bank target of 2.0%. Switzerland’s consumer price index (CPI) increased by 0.5% in June 2022, less than the 0.7% rise in May 2022. At the end of May 2022, annual inflation was 2.9%. By the end of June 2022 it was 3.4%, the highest since 1993. Big drivers of...

Empty supermarket shelves in Pokrovsk, Ukraine, on July 2 Keystone / Orlando Barria Switzerland will double its aid to Ukraine to CHF100 million ($104 million) by the end of 2023, Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis announced at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in the Swiss city of Lugano. He also freed up CHF15 million to support the country’s digital economy. “Ukraine has to lead [its reconstruction] but we have to support it,” said Cassis, who also holds the rotating...

In Switzerland, it is possible to pay delinquent debts with large sums of cash. Some criminals are using the loophole to launder money, reports Le Matin. Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.com Swiss broadcaster SRF investigated several official debt enforcement offices across Switzerland and found that large sums of cash were passing through some of them. In Geneva, CHF 24 million of cash passed through its cantonal offices des poursuites in 2021, some of it dirty,...

The price of household goods for Swiss consumers rose 3.4% in June compared to the same month last year, led by the surging cost of fuel and heating oil. “Inflation, which has de facto been absent for more than a decade, is back with a vengeance,” said economic forecast group BAK Economics. “However, this is no reason for inflation or stagflation [rising prices combined with slower economic output] panic.” BAK Economics is confident that a number of factors will...

Physicists are hoping for new discoveries by ramping up the energy for the Large Hadron Collider. © Keystone / Laurent Gillieron Ten years after it discovered the Higgs boson, the world’s biggest particle accelerator is poised to smash together protons at record energy levels at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, as scientists resume their search for clues to the origins of the universe. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will get back to work on July 5,...

Welcome to the American corporate-debt market of 2022. Often the only risky bonds that are being issued are the legacy debts of a now ancient-seeming time—when interest rates were low and a recession was unthinkable. Elsewhere, the high-yield market has almost ground to a halt. A paltry $83bn of risky debt has been issued so far in 2022, 75% less than in the same period last year. A sharp rise in interest rates in the first half of this year has cooled credit...

Sommaruga (left) during the opening of a water power plant at Nant de Drance in the Swiss mountains last month. © Keystone/Laurent Gillieron Energy Minister Simonetta Sommaruga has warned of possible shortages of natural gas in Switzerland during the winter months. She said the government prepared made plans to prevent energy blackouts due to a drop in Russian gas imports in the context of war in Ukraine. But it was impossible to guarantee sufficient supplies for the...