Tag Archives: Featured

Turnover adjusted for sales days and holidays rose in the retail sector by 5.4% in nominal terms in November 2021 compared with the previous year. Seasonally adjusted, nominal turnover rose by 1.4% compared with the previous month. These are provisional findings from the Federal Statistical Office (FSO). Real turnover adjusted for sales days and holidays rose in the retail sector by 5.8% in November 2021 compared with the previous year. Real growth takes inflation...

The Swiss central bank has again profited from its interventions in the foreign exchange markets. © Keystone / Ti-press / Alessandro Crinari The Swiss National Bank (SNB) expects to post a profit of CHF26 billion ($28 billion) for 2021, a windfall made exclusively from its growing foreign currency holdings. The central bank will likely distribute CHF6 billion to the confederation and cantons under the terms of a profit-sharing agreementExternal link that was made...

Update January 10, 2021:  Sight Deposits have risen by +1.9 bn CHF, this means that the SNB is intervening and buying Euros and Dollars. We had finally arrived in the inflation scenario I was speaking about before. Inflation is the period, when both the Swiss franc and gold must go up. BUT : U.S. CPI is at 5%, at the highest value since the year 1990 (excluding one outlayer in Summer 2008). But European inflation has gone down to 1.9%., In...

The New Year has started with a sharp fall in the price of bitcoin – and some intriguing stories surrounding the Swiss cryptocurrency scene. The industry is well used to volatility in the price of cryptocurrencies and is ploughing on with expansion plans regardless of how many dollars you can currently get for your bitcoin. New heads at Switzerland’s oldest crypto firm As management shake-ups go, Bitcoin Suisse has raised the bar to a new level. The crypto company’s...

When Alan Greenspan went back to Stanford University in September 1997, his reputation was by then well-established. Even as he had shocked the world only nine months earlier with “irrational exuberance”, the theme of his earlier speech hadn’t actually been about stocks; it was all about money. The “maestro” would revisit that subject repeatedly especially in the late nineties, and it was again his topic in California early Autumn ’97. As Emil Kalinowski and I had...

If we no longer have the capacity to distinguish between moral legitimacy and self-serving corruption, then we might as well eliminate the Middleman and vote directly for Pfizer or Merck. There’s a fancy word for cutting out the Middleman: disintermediation. Removing intermediaries who take a cut but neither produce nor add value makes perfect sense, reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Maybe it’s time to eliminate the politicians who soak up hundreds of...

Runaway house price inflation continues to characterize the U.S. market. House prices across the country rose 15.8% on average in October 2021 from the year before. U.S. house prices are far over their 2006 Bubble peak, and remain over the Bubble peak even after adjustment for consumer price inflation. They will keep on rising at the annual rate of 14–16% for the rest of 2021, according to the AEI Housing Center. Unbelievably, in this situation the Federal Reserve...

© Alyssand | Dreamstime.com The Swiss housing market continues to rise with no signs of weakening, reported RTS this week. According to the real estate platform immoscout24, the average price per m2 for a family home in Switzerland has risen from CHF 6,700 to CHF 7,200 over the last 12 months, a rise of 7%. Apartment prices have risen even further in some places. According to Roxane Montagner, who works for CiFi, a company that advises real estate professionals, the...

With the monthly Friday Payroll Ritual lurking tomorrow morning, and having been focused on PMI estimates before it, a quick look at the ISM’s Non-manufacturing PMI especially its employment index to bridge the latter to the former. The update today for the month of December put the headline estimate at 62.0, down from 69.1 the month prior. Omicron? While a rather sharp and unexpected 7-point drop, other than the size of the decline at 62.0 there’s little to suspect...

Repatriated passengers were expected to cover 80% of their flight bills. Keystone / Salvatore Di Nolfi The majority of stranded Swiss people repatriated during the first pandemic wave have paid back their share of flight bills. But the foreign ministry has been forced to write off CHF210,000 ($230,000) and is still haggling over another CHF360,000. In spring 2020, Switzerland arranged for over 7,000 people (4,000 Swiss and 3,000 non-Swiss) to be flown homeExternal...