Tag Archives: Business

SIX group has backed its new DLT exchange to enhance the way stocks and bonds are traded worldwide. © Keystone / Ennio Leanza A new Swiss stock exchange has been awarded a license to trade digital assets using distributed ledger technology (DLT). On Friday, the SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) was given the go-ahead by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) to operate as a stock exchange and central securities depositoryExternal link. The licensing...

Adding value to cocoa can bring in more revenue for West African producers. Keystone / Legnan Koula In a bid to grab a bigger slice of the chocolate pie, cocoa-producing countries Ivory Coast and Ghana are turning to China for funding and a new marketplace. The move could pose a threat to the Swiss chocolate industry’s profit margins and its supply of raw materials. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, VIPs in smart suits and traditional Ivorian dress gathered at an...

The number of outstanding mortgages increased by 3% on last year Keystone / Urs Flueeler A report by the leading Swiss bank UBS has found an increased risk of a real estate bubble forming in Switzerland’s housing market. The UBS Swiss real estate bubble index has risen from 1.78 to 1.90 points, in the second quarter of 2021, remaining in the ‘risk zone’, according to a report published on Tuesday. The increase is driven by a rapid rise in prices in the Swiss...

The bank will face a trial over its role in Mozambique’s $2 billion (CHF1.8 billion) “tuna bonds” scandal, a fresh blow as it struggles to shake off a succession of crises that have plagued the group in recent years. The High Court judge presiding over a London lawsuit brought by creditors against Credit Suisse set a date last month of September 2023 for a 13-week trial, according to people familiar with the matter. The re-emergence of an eight-year-old scandal is a...

Ralph Hamers took up the CEO post at Swiss bank UBS in 2020. Keystone / Walter Bieri “How can we [ . . .] fight increased inequality?” railed Ralph Hamers in a recent interview. To be clear, Hamers is not the boss of Unicef, or Oxfam or the Social Mobility Foundation. He is chief executive of Swiss bank UBS, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the widening wealth gap. UBS’s latest results quantified that benefit. Second-quarter net profit surged 63% to $2 billion...

The affair exploded in autumn 2019 when it emerged that Credit Suisse had private detectives tail Khan, a former head of wealth management who had left the bank for competitor UBS. © Keystone / Christian Beutler The Swiss bank and its former top manager Iqbal Khan have agreed to end all pending criminal proceedings in a 2019 spying affair that toppled the company’s top brass. Speaking to the Reuters news agency, a spokesperson for Credit Suisse confirmed a report in...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The president of the national marketing body Switzerland Tourism says the year 2021 is on course to be even worse than 2020, with 5% fewer hotel stays expected. "This is not good news, because 2020 was the worst year in history" for the sector, Martin Nydegger told the newspaper SonntagsZeitung.

Central banks’ massive Quantitative Easing (QE) programs have come under scrutiny many times since the central banks fired up the printing press and began quantitative easing programs en masse after the 2008-09 Great Financial Crisis. However, the increase in central bank assets due to quantitative easing programs during the crisis pale in comparison to the QE programs during the Covid pandemic. As economies recovered after the Great Financial Crisis many worried...

Tangled in the cloud: a Federal court will now review the contract decision. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally Google has appealed a recent Swiss decision to award a cloud-computing contract to five other digital firms. The tender process has also come under criticism by defenders of data sovereignty. Google’s appeal targets the government’s decision last month to name US companies Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, and Chinese firm Alibaba, as winning candidates to create...

Farmers are now getting lower prices for their crop even though a living wage premium was introduced. Keystone / Legnan Koula Farmers in Ivory Coast – the world’s largest cocoa-producing nation – are getting less for their cocoa despite the introduction of a payment that aims to secure them a living wage. The West African nation of Ivory Coast accounts for around 45% of the world’s cocoa production that brings in export revenue of $3.5 billion (CHF3.2 billion) a...