Tag Archives: Business

Neon appears to be aiming to be Switzerland’s answer to Revolut. (Neon) Swiss financial services company Neon says it will scrap card fees for customers shopping abroad to spearhead an ambitious drive to boost the number of clients to 250,000 in the next two years. The Zurich-based fintech company has laid down a challenge to foreign competitors, such as Revolut and N26, with its announcement. From Monday (January 20) customers will no longer have to pay a combined...

This year, as the WEF marks its 50th anniversary, a new urgency hangs over the Alpine town. (Keystone / Gian Ehrenzeller) World leaders, chief executives, thinkers and celebrities are gathering in the Swiss mountain town of Davos for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. The event, which begins on Tuesday, has earned a reputation for high-altitude pontificating as the global elite gather to pitch their takes on topics picked by WEF founder Klaus Schwab, from...

The free market in Switzerland has built housing units that remain empty because they are too expensive, or in out-of-the-way places, says Marina Carobbio Guscetti. The Social Democrat senator believes that the initiative “More affordable housing” will fix these problems. It will help the middle class and the less well-off. Apart from health insurance premiums, rent is the biggest item in many family budgets. Since 2005, in spite of lower interest rates and a...

The SNB said its interventions were transparent and ‘motivated purely by monetary policy’ (Keystone) The US Treasury has called on the Swiss government to cut taxes and spend more public money, after it added the country to a watchlist of those it accuses of currency manipulation. The Swiss franc nudged up to a near three-year high against the euro on Tuesday as markets anticipated the move would limit the Swiss National Bank’s appetite for aggressive action to try...

The US Treasury said it was also closely monitoring the interventions of the Swiss National Bank in the foreign exchange market (© Keystone / Ti-press / Alessandro Crinari) The US Treasury Department has put Switzerland back on a biannual list of countries that are under observation because of large trade surpluses with the United States. Switzerland was previously included on the Monitoring Listexternal link between October 2016 and October 2018, “having a material...

Injection of pressurised water underground creates a lot of pressure in the spaces between the rocks and is believed to be responsible for minor tremors. (Keystone / George Frey / Raser Technologies) Identifying the kind of fault or tectonic forces in an underground reservoir can reduce the risk of tremors caused by geothermal energy or carbon storage. The injection of cold pressurised water into hot impermeable rocks several kilometres underground is how underground...

It will be Trump’s first trip outside the US since becoming only the third American president to be impeached (Keystone) US President Donald Trump plans to attend the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos this month, making up for an appearance he cancelled during last year’s US government shutdown. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham confirmed on Wednesday that Trump would attend the annual forumexternal...

Union federation chief Pierre-Yves Maillard and vice-president Vania Alleva, on Thursday. (Keystone / Marcel Bieri) Switzerland’s largest trade union group has repeated its warning that any framework deal reached with the European Union must respect measures to protect wages from cross-border competition. At the annual conference of the Swiss Trade Union Federationexternal link on Thursday, the objective of keeping wage measures in place was hammered home by group...

The SNB made a profit of around CHF40 billion from its foreign currency positions and a valuation gain of CHF6.9 billion on its gold holdings (Keystone) The Swiss National Bank (SNB) expects to post an annual profit of CHF49 billion ($50.29 billion) for 2019, it said on Thursday, citing big gains from foreign bonds and stocks bought to dampen the value of the safe-haven Swiss franc. The profit, following a loss of CHF15 billion in 2018, means the central bank will...

Access to home ownership became more expensive. (© Keystone / Ennio Leanza) Rents in Switzerland fell by an average of 0.5% last year but some regions bucked the trend. Last year was a good one for tenants, according to the Swiss Real Estate Offer Indexexternal link, which was published on Tuesday. December alone saw rents dropping 0.4% on average. The most significant drops were in central Switzerland (-1.7%), the Lake Geneva region (-1.1%) and northwestern...