Tag Archives: Featured

The Swiss People’s Party (UDC/SVP) in Geneva wants shopping hours in Geneva to be standardized and extended. © Tea | Dreamstime.com - Click to enlarge In general, French-speaking Switzerland has stricter laws on opening hours that the rest of Switzerland. For example a Migros store in Zurich is open until 9pm every night except Sunday. A similar store in Geneva is only open until 9pm one day a week. The rest of the...

Whilst sales of quartz watches declined last year, demand for more expensive mechanical timepieces grew significantly. (Keystone) - Click to enlarge After two years of decline, the Swiss watch industry grew by 2.7% in 2017, according to the figures released by the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry (FH) on Tuesday. Exports grew by 2.7 % to CHF19.9 billion ($21.3 billion) on 2016. “Growth returned sooner...

Something for Nothing The world is full of bad ideas.  Just look around.  One can hardly blink without a multitude of bad ideas coming into view.  What’s more, the worse an idea is, the more popular it becomes. Take Mickey’s Fine Malt Liquor.  It’s nearly as destructive as prescription pain killers.  Yet people chug it down with reckless abandon. Looking at the expression of this Mickey’s Malt Liquor tester one might...

The Used Goods Question Retail sales in several countries like Germany, Japan and Switzerland continue to fall or they remain steady for years. In the United States they have strongly risen recently. We should remind readers, that used goods sold via Ebay or similar, are not contained in this statistics. Still they create economic value for the purchases. By mentality, Swiss, Germans or Japanese pay more attention so...

December’s US tax cuts – which saw corporate taxation reduced particularly sharply – are being echoed in signs that ‘animal spirits’ are finally kicking in. Both set the stage, in our view, for higher US growth, in large part driven by greater investment. We therefore upgrade our 2018 US growth forecast from 2.0% to 3.0%. We forecast that real non-residential investment growth will accelerate to 7.0% in 2018, up from an...

Around a quarter of Swiss workers are stressed and exhausted, according to new research. © Rawpixelimages | Dreamstime.com - Click to enlarge A three-year study by the University of Bern and Zurich University of Applied Sciences, which covers the period from 2014 to 2016, estimates that this stress and exhaustion cost Swiss companies between CHF 5 and CHF 5.8 billion a year. The cost of sick days is only the tip of...

The workers were sub-contracted and received about a third of a proper wage. (Keystone) - Click to enlarge A labour court in Geneva has ruled against a Polish subcontractor that underpaid its seconded employees working on a Geneva building site. The workers were earning €8 an hour, about a third of what the work warranted, the court said. The case has been ongoing for almost five years and was led by the...

In one of those rare turns, the term “globally synchronized growth” actually means what the words do. It is economic growth that for the first time in ten years has all the major economies of the world participating in it. It’s the kind of big idea that seems like a big thing we all should pay attention to. In The New York Times this weekend, we learn: A decade after the world descended into a devastating economic...

The ensuing social disunity and disruption will be of the sort many alive today have never seen. Social movements arise to solve problems of inequality, injustice, exploitation and oppression. In other words, they are solutions to society-wide problems plaguing the many but not the few (i.e. the elites at the top of the wealth-power pyramid). The basic assumption of social movements is that Utopia is within reach, if...

FOMC Strategy Revisited As readers know, investment and trading decisions can be optimized with the help of statistics. One way of doing so is offered by the FOMC meeting strategy. The rate hikes are actually leading somewhere – after the Wile E. Coyote moment, the FOMC meeting strategy is especially useful - Click to enlarge A study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2011 examined the effect of...