Tag Archives: Featured

Switzerland’s shrinking banking universe has been bolstered by a new wealth management entrant, Alpian, which is aiming for the sweet spot between digital and human-centric services. Alpian has just secured a Swiss banking license along with a CHF19 million ($20.5 million) capital boost from the Italian banking group Intesa Sanpaolo. Looking at the bare figures, Switzerland could do with some reinforcements. The number of separate banking entities in the Alpine state...

Residents walk through rubble in the Ukrainian city of Bucha on Wednesday. Hundreds of tortured and murdered civilians have been found in Bucha and other parts of the Kyiv region after the Russian army retreated from those areas. Keystone / Roman Pilipey Switzerland has so far frozen some CHF7.5 billion ($8 billion) in funds and assets under sanctions against Russians to punish Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. These are funds in frozen accounts and properties in four...

Those trusting the Fed to be visibly weak, corrupt and incompetent forever might be in for an unwelcome surprise. When even the crash test dummies are nervous, it pays to pay attention. Being in a mild crash isn’t too bad if all the protective devices inflate as intended. But in a horrific crash where nothing goes as planned, it’s like speeding in a ready-to-explode Pinto and being side-swiped by a semi on Dead Man’s Curve. The stock market is in the Pinto, and the...

The organic food market in Switzerland experienced slower growth in 2021 than the previous year. However, consumers are spending more than ever on organic products. According to annual figures released by the organic food association Bio Suisse on Wednesday, the market for organic products grew 0.6% in 2021 to reach a share of 10.9% of the total market. In 2020, the association recorded a 4% growth in organic sales. One of the reasons for the slower growth is that...

The invasion of Ukraine, the spike in inflation and the risks of supply shortages have made some politicians dust off some of the worst economic ideas in history: autarky and protectionism. Some believe that if our nation produced everything we needed we would all be better off because we would not depend on others. The idea comes from a deep lack of understanding of economics. There is no such thing as autarky. There is no such thing as covering all the needs of a...

Overview:  The capital markets are calmer today.  The market is digesting the FOMC minutes, where officials tipped an aggressive path to shrink the balance sheet and confirmed an “expeditious” campaign to lift the Fed funds rate to neutrality.  Benchmark 10-year yields are softer, with the US off a couple basis points to 2.58%.  European yields are 1-3 bp lower.  After the equity losses in the US yesterday, including a 2.2% drop in the NASDAQ, Asia Pacific equities...

Unter dem Namen „Meta“ hat Mark Zuckerberg erst vor kurzem sein Unternehmen neu aufgestellt. Das mit dem Unternehmen verbundene Metaverse soll nicht nur die Social Media Plattform Facebook beinhalten, sondern einer ganzen Familie an Apps ein Zuhause bieten. Für die Finanzabwicklung im Metaverse wird offenbar sogar an einem eigenen Cryptocoin gearbeitet. Crypto News: Meta plant Implementierung von Cryptocoins Unter dem Arbeitstitel “Zuck Buck” wird derzeit eine...

This isn’t going to be like the tale of Goldilocks, at least not how it’s usually told. There are three central banks, sure, call them bears if you wish, each pursuing a different set of fuzzy policies. One is clearly hot, the other quite cold, the final almost certainly won’t be “just right.” Rather, this one in the middle simply finds itself…in the middle of the other two. Running red-hot to the point of near-horror, that’s “our” Federal Reserve. The FOMC minutes...

07.04.2022 – At the end of 2021, more than one in ten Swiss citizens lived abroad. This was a 1.5% increase compared with 2020. Most of these citizens lived in Europe. Regardless of the continent in which they lived, the majority were aged between 18 and 64. Reflecting Switzerland’s multicultural nature, many of them also had more than one nationality, according to the results of the statistics on the Swiss abroad from the Federal Statistical Office (FSO). In 2021,...

Angehrn (left) and Amstad stressed that stability of the Swiss financial institutions is key for digitalisation and sustainability of the banking sector. © Keystone/Anthony Anex Switzerland’s financial market supervisor FINMA says the Russian invasion of Ukraine isn’t a wide-scale threat to Swiss financial firms’ business ties to Russia. FINMAExternal link’s chief executive Urban Angehrn said that, overall, the immediate effects of risks to the financial centre were...