Tag Archives: Bloomberg

The US Treasury on Monday added Swiss Franc (CHF) back to its currency watch list and urged Switzerland to adjust its macroeconomic policies to more forcefully support domestic economic activity, according to Bloomberg. The Treasury report released Monday said: Despite borrowing costs for the Swiss government being among the lowest in the world, fiscal policy remains underutilized, even within the constraints of Switzerland’s existing fiscal rules. The Swiss Franc is...

According to an article in Bloomberg on November 5, 2019, Milton Friedman’s business cycle theory seems to be vindicated. According to Milton Friedman, strong recoveries are just natural after particularly deep recessions. Like a guitar string, the harder the string is plucked down, the faster it should come back up. Bigger recessions should lead to faster growth rates during the recoveries, to get the economy back to the pre-recession level of activity. In...

The IMF projects that China will expand by less than 6% in 2020, but unless China provides more stimulus, it may be difficult to achieve. This is not only my view but also the view of Helen Qiao, the chief economist for Greater China at Bank of America. I was on the Bloomberg set with Alix Steele and Ms. Qiao earlier today. The PBOC passed on an opportunity to cut rates this week when it set the new Loan Prime Rate.  Qiao says there is still a window for fresh action...

Like the other lagging European investment banks (Deutsche and SocGen immediately spring to mind), UBS is resorting to the last resort of the embattled megabank CEO when shareholders are demanding higher profits ‘or else’. After a decade where UBS cut thousands of jobs in its investment bank unit, Sergio Ermotti is turning to one of the few business lines where fat can feasibly be cut: UBS’s once legendary...

You know things have really changed when Economists start revising their statements more than the data. What’s going on in the global economy has quickly reached a critical stage. This represents a big shift in expectations, a really big one, especially in the mainstream where the words “strong” and “boom” couldn’t have been used any more than they were. If you read nothing other than Bloomberg, it’s as if some alien...

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,...

– Palladium prices surge to new record high over $1,100/oz today – Palladium surges past record nominal price seen in 2001 after 55% surge in 2017– Best-performing precious metal and commodity of 2017 is palladium – Palladium prices top platinum prices for first time in 16 years– Strong Chinese car demand and switch from diesel to petrol cars sees demand surge– Supply crunch as six year supply deficit & 2017...

In a bizarre series of events that have had limited coverage but which are sure to have far-reaching consequences for benchmark pricing in the precious metals markets, the LBMA Gold Price and LBMA Silver Price auctions both experienced embarrassing trading glitches over consecutive trading days on Monday 10 April and Tuesday 11 April. At the outset, its worth remembering that both of these London-based benchmarks are...

EM ended last week on a soft note, and that weakness seems likely to carry over into this week.  Dollar sentiment turned more positive after firm retail sales data on Friday, though US rates markets have yet to reflect any increase in Fed tightening expectations.  Over the weekend, China reported weaker than expected April IP, retail sales, and fixed asset investment.  This continues a string of weak data for the month, and will undercut notions that the world’s second largest economy is...