Tag Archives: Featured

Switzerland’s real gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 0.6% in the 1st quarter of 2018.* Although growth lost some momentum in comparison to the second half of 2017, it was nevertheless broad-based across the various business sectors. The secondary sector expanded modestly, while growth in several service sectors accelerated, including in trade and business-related services. The entertainment industry recorded strong...

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...

“Nestlé remains fully committed to its home base in Switzerland”, wrote the company in a press release. Swiss food giant Nestlé plans to cut as many as 500 computer-service jobs in Switzerland as part of a restructuring plan to increase profitability, the company announced on Tuesday. Nestlé will be outsourcing the IT jobs to Spain, according to a press release published on the company’s website. “We understand that...

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by -0.42% to 1.1485 CHF. EUR-CHF and USD-CHF, May 31(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates The global capital markets that were in panic mode on Tuesday stabilized yesterday, and corrective forces have carried into today’s activity. However, the underlying issues in Italy and Spain are hardly clarified in the past 48 hours. ...

The New In Gold We Trust Report is Here! As announced in our latest gold market update last week, this year’s In Gold We Trust report by our good friends Ronald Stoeferle and Mark Valek has just been released. This is the biggest and most comprehensive gold research report in the world, and as always contains a wealth of interesting new material, as well as the traditional large collection of charts and data that...

The KOF Economic Barometer for May fell by 3.3 points to a new standing of exactly 100 points. The last time the Barometer had a similar standing was in December 2015. The current value of 100 points to an average development of the Swiss economy in the coming months. In May, the KOF Economic Barometer fell by 3.3 points to 100 points from revised 103.3 in April (first publication in April: 105.3). Within a...

This crowd backed a winner: Bernese football fans gather outside parliament on May 20 after their team, Young Boys, won the Swiss league (Keystone) Swiss crowdfunding platforms dealt with CHF375 million ($377 million) in 2017, almost three times as much as the previous year. Some 160,000 people supported a crowdfunding project. Over the past eight years, more than half a billion francs have been collected via the...

Swiss Franc The Euro rise by 0.38% to 1.1479 CHF. This is the fifth day in sequence that the Swiss Franc appreciated. EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, May 30(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates After what could be described as a 15-sigma event yesterday in the Italian bond market, a reprieve today has seen the euro recover a cent from yesterday’s lows. While the...

This is how systems collapse: faith in the visible surface of abundance reigns supreme, and the fragility of the buffers goes unnoticed. I often discuss systems and systemic collapse, and I’ve drawn up a little diagram to illustrate a key dynamic in systemic collapse. The key concepts here are stability and buffers. Though complex systems are never static, but they can be stable: that is, they ebb and flow within...

See the introduction and the video for the terms gold basis, co-basis, backwardation and contango. Crude Oil Market Structure – Extremes in Speculative Net Long Positions On May 28, markets were closed so this Report is coming out a day later than normal. The price of gold rose nine bucks, and the price of silver 4 pennies. With little action here, we thought we would write 1,000 words’ worth about oil. Here is a chart...