Tag Archives: Bank of England

In the FT, Chris Giles, Caroline Binham, and Delphine Strauss report about plans of the Bank of England to let fintech companies bank at Threadneedle Street and thereby offer payments systems on a level playing field with commercial banks. The editorial board of the FT welcomes the plans; it seems to have in mind not only competition but also “synthetic” CBDC: By offering fintech companies access to the BoE’s vaults, the governor may inject much-needed competition into the sector. What...

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by 0.48% at 1.1104 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, June 20(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: The prospect of “lower for longer” continues to fuel the bond and stock rally. The initial US equity response to the Fed was positive but not strong and closed about 0.3% higher.  Asia Pacific equities followed suit with mostly modest...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.07% at 1.1402 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, May 02(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: The US dollar is consolidating yesterday’s post-Fed rally, and this is giving it a slightly heavier tone today. Equities are mostly lower and Europe’s Dow Jones Stoxx 600 is off about 0.5% in late morning turnover, which if sustained would...

There has been a lot of media coverage recently about the re-emergence of central bank gold buying and the overall larger quantity of gold than central banks as a group have been buying recently compared to previous years. For example, according to the World Gold Council’s Gold Demand Trends for Q3 2018, net purchases of gold by central banks in the third quarter of this year were 22% higher than Q3 2017, and the...

The first day of each month sees the reporting of a number of statistics about the London Gold Market by the bullion bank led London Bullion Market Association (LBMA). These statistics focus on clearing data and vault holdings data and are reported in a 1 month lag basis for clearing activity and a 3 month lag basis for vault holdings data. Therefore the latest clearing data just published is for the month of August,...

The week ahead sees three major central bank meetings and the US employment report. It will likely be the most important work before a hiatus that runs through the end of August.  Of course, and perhaps more than ever, market participants are well aware that the US President’s communication and penchant for disruption is a bit of a wild card. That said, the equity market has learned to take individual company references...

You would never have guessed it reading many of the op-eds and pundits pronouncing the end to globalization or the West, or liberalism. Global equities have rallied. Of course,  stock prices are not the end all and be all, but it stands in stark contrast to the cries that the sky is falling. The MSCI World Index of developed markets advanced for the second consecutive week adding 2.2%. The US S&P 500 moved above...

Say what one will, US President Trump is vigorously projecting what he believes are American interests. There is virtually no sign of the isolationism that many observers had anticipated. Indeed, as we have argued, the America First rejection of the League of Nations that Trump harkens back to was not isolationist as much as unilateralist. And the same is true of the Trump Administration. He is trying to get North Korea...

On 17 April, Turkish news publication Ahval published a report stating that during 2017, Turkey withdrew 26.8 tonnes of gold that it had stored in the vaults of the New York Federal Reserve, and moved this gold under the custodianship of the Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The source of the Ahval report was a Turkish language article from the popular Hürriyet newspaper in Turkey....

A year ago, the Dutch and French elections signaled that UK referendum to leave the EU and the US election of Trump did not usher in a populist-nationalist epoch, such as the one that proceeded the last great financial crisis. The euro gapped higher and did not look back. We have contended that Macron’s victory, in particular, sparked a correction to the euro’s decline that began in mid-2014. Using technical tools, we...