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The private bank wants to boost profitability with a new three-year strategy - Click to enlarge Swiss wealth manager Julius Bär will cut 300 jobs this year, its chief executive said on Monday, as it looks to boost profitability after a double-digit percentage earnings fall in 2019. The private bank wants to boost profitability with a new three-year strategy to deal with continued margin pressures, Philipp Rickenbacher said. The Zurich-based lender aims to improve...

EM remains vulnerable to deteriorating risk sentiment as the coronavirus spreads.  China announced a series of measures over the weekend to help support its financial markets, but this may not be enough to turn sentiment around yet.  China markets reopen Monday after the extended Lunar New Year holiday and it won’t be pretty.  AMERICAS Brazil reports January trade Monday.  December IP will be reported Tuesday, which is expected to fall -0.8% y/y vs. -1.7% in...

That Americans are in the throes of a crisis in democracy has become a commonplace refrain of late. I have noticed that almost all such commentary treats political democracy, implicitly or explicitly, as the ideal. Yet in truth it is a seriously flawed ideal. In fact, as F. A. Hayek noted years ago, all the inherited limitations on government power are breaking down before…unlimited democracy…the problem today. Perhaps the most blatant evidence against the idea that...

Jay Powell says that three’s not a crowd, at least not for his rate cuts, but four would be. As usual, central bankers like him always hedge and say that “should conditions warrant” the FOMC will be more than happy to indulge (the NYSE). But what he means in his heart of hearts is that there probably won’t be any need. Three should do the trick nicely. And a lot of people, from what I can tell, believe him if not simply because he’s already stopped. The last two...

At the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Bob Prince, co-chief investment officer at Bridgewater Associates, attracted attention when he suggested in a news interview that the boom and bust cycle as we have come to know it in the last decades may have ended. This viewpoint may well have been encouraged by the fact that the latest economic upswing (“boom”) has been going for around a decade and that an end is not in sight as suggested by incoming macro- and...

Headline GDP growth during the fourth quarter of 2019 was 2.05849% (continuously compounded annual rate), slightly lower than the (revised) 2.08169% during Q3. For the year, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) puts total real output at $19.07 trillion, or annual growth of 2.33% and down from 2.93% in 2018. Last year was weaker than 2017, the second lowest out of the six since 2013. And that’s where the good news ends. Eurodollar Disruption, Peaks &...

Für das Jahr 2019 prognostizierten die Auguren zwei weitere Zins-Erhöhungen durch das FED. Diese Erwartung schien wie in Stein gemeisselt, weshalb die Aktienmärkte im letzten Quartal 2018 auch massiv nachgaben und die Prognosen für das Jahr 2019 entsprechend eintrübten. Der eine oder andere – auch angeblich professionelle Anleger – reduzierte seine Aktienquote. Das Jahr 2019 brachte uns indessen drei Zins-Senkungen, nicht zuletzt, weil Präsident Trump dies forderte...

31.01.2020 – In 2019, 6 160 300 motor vehicles circulated on Swiss roads. This was 46 500 or 0.8% more than in the previous year. Three quarters of the entire fleet were passenger cars, including an increasing number of electric cars: of the 312 900 cars that were newly registered in 2019, 13 200 or 4.2% were purely battery operated. This meant that new registrations of electric cars increased substantially year-on-year (+143.9%) while the number of petrol-driven...

Dow 30,000 is “unsinkable,” just like the Titanic. A recent Barrons cover celebrating the euphoric inevitability of Dow 30,000 captured the mainstream zeitgeist perfectly: Corporate America is firing on all cylinders, the Federal Reserve’s god-like powers will push stocks higher regardless of any other reality, blah blah blah. While the financial media looked elsewhere for its amusement, the coronavirus epidemic in China just poured fentanyl in the Dow 30,000...

Introduced by Representative Okimoto (R-36), House Bill 1830 removes sales and use tax against gold and silver bullion and currency in Hawaii. Under current law, Hawaii citizens are discouraged from insuring their savings against the devaluation of the dollar because they are penalized with taxation for doing so. Passage of this measure would remove disincentives to holding gold and silver for this purpose. HB 1830 is important for a few reasons: Levying sales taxes...