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The amount of electricity consumed in Switzerland has fallen by 6.4% over the past 19 years Switzerland is on track to meet its short-term greener energy goals, but the government warns that more work needs to be done to meet more ambitious mid-term targets by 2035. The alpine country plans to be carbon neutral by 2050. On Thursday, the Federal Office of Energyexternal link released its second report that monitors national energy consumption and its effect on the...

All doctrines that have sought to discover in the course of human history some definite trend in the sequence of changes have disagreed, in reference to the past, with the historically established facts and where they tried to predict the future have been spectacularly proved wrong by later events. Most of these doctrines were characterized by reference to a state of perfection in human affairs. They placed this perfect state either at the beginning of history or at...

Ueli Maurer reviews guards during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on April 29 (Keystone / Madoka Ikegami / Pool) Ueli Maurer, who holds the rotating Swiss presidency this year, was set to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday. It is Maurer’s fourth foreign visit this year that has raised eyebrows in Switzerland. Most controversial was his trip in October to Saudi Arabia, which had already been postponed after the...

[embedded content] On November 19, 1999, after eight years of construction, the Vereina Tunnel opened in eastern Switzerland. Connecting the Landquart – Davos Platz and the Bever – Scuol-Tarasp lines, the tunnel is 19 kilometres long and the journey through takes 18 minutes. In 20 years, it has brought various improvements to locals, tourists, and businesses. However, its construction had initially been opposed by some as it was feared that the tunnel would lead to...

What’s been normalized are policies and cultural norms that seek to enrich and protect the few at the expense of the many. When the initially extraordinary fades into the unremarkable background of everyday life, we say it’s been normalized. Put another way, we quickly habituate to new conditions, and rationalize our ready acceptance of what was previously unacceptable. Technology offers many examples of extraordinary advances quickly becoming normalized as we...

‘Retail Gold Insights 2019’ has just been published by the World Gold Council. It is a thematic analysis of their new consumer research survey. With a base of 18,000 participants across India, China, Russia, Germany, the US and Canada, we believe it is the largest ever consumer survey on the global gold market. 5 main themes of the report People are confident in – and loyal to – gold. Gold already has strong foundations and it’s important to know where that...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.18% to 1.0997 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, November 22(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: Equities in the Asia Pacific managed to mostly shrug off the drag of the losses in US equities yesterday. China and India could not escape the pull, but most other bourses were higher, led by Singapore and Hong Kong. It was the second consecutive week that the MSCI Asia Pacific Index...

There’s been talk that the Federal Reserve will slam interest rates to zero or even negative when the next recession strikes. President Trump’s support for negative interest rates has quickly increased in the last several months as the latest tracking estimates for Q4 GDP have tumbled to sub 0.4%. It seems that policy rates in the US are too high — and will likely conform to the rest of the world, which is near zero to negative territory. This has undoubtedly...

Following its latest recovery, USD/CHF rises to the highest since the previous Tuesday. 200-day SMA and multi-week-old resistance line hold the key to pair’s run-up towards 1.0000 mark. 0.9870 can entertain short-term sellers. Based on its U-turn from 0.9870, the USD/CHF pair current takes the bids to the highest in eight-day while trading around 0.9940 during early Friday. However, 200-day Simple Moving Average (SMA) and a downward sloping trend line since...

School children learn that there are three branches of government: the legislative, executive, and judicial. In actual practice, however, there are four branches of government. The fourth is what for decades now has been called a “headless fourth branch of government,” the administrative state. As early as 1937, in a ” Report of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management ,” the authors write: Without plan or intent, there has grown up a headless “fourth...