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Why is SHIBOR falling from an economic perspective? Simple again. China’s growth both on its own and as a reflection of actual global growth has stalled. And in a dynamic, non-linear world stalled equals trouble. Going all the way back to early 2017, there’s been no acceleration (and more than a little deceleration). The reflation economy got started in 2016 but it never went anywhere. For most of last year, optimists...

The withdrawal of the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement lift it exposed on two fronts. First, the TPP was going to modernize the NAFTA. Without, the US remains locked in protracted negotiations. A breakthrough in talks with Mexico has been reportedly imminent for weeks. Talks with Canada have apparently not progressed very far in recently, and the US insistence on a sunset clause remains a...

Swiss Trade Union Federation President Paul Rechsteiner, pictured, said unions would go as far as forcing a referendum to ensure that Switzerland protects wages autonomously. (Keystone) Switzerland’s largest national trade union centre has refused to participate in discussions led by Swiss Economics Minister Johann Schneider-Ammann on easing measures for wages and working conditions as part of framework negotiations...

Consider how a “balanced portfolio” yielding “balanced returns” worked out for middle class retirees in Venezuela. The fantasy that a “balanced portfolio” yielding “balanced returns” will fund a stable retirement for decades to come is widely accepted as a sure thing: inflation will stay near-zero essentially forever, assets such as stocks and bonds will continue yielding hefty income and capital gains, and all the...

See the introduction and the video for the terms gold basis, co-basis, backwardation and contango. Explaining a new paradigm can be both simple and impossible at the same time. For example, Copernicus taught that the other planets and Sun do not revolve around the Earth. He said that all the planets revolve around the Sun, including Earth. It isn’t hard to say, and it isn’t especially hard to grasp. Indeed, one of its...

The only way to pay all these future obligations is by creating new money. I’ve been focusing on inflation, which is more properly understood as the loss of purchasing power of a currency, which when taken to extremes destroys the currency and the wealth/income of everyone forced to use that currency. The funny thing about the loss of a currency’s purchasing power is that it wipes out every holder of that currency, rich...

After several months of heated market speculation, to Amazon’s chagrin the question of which stock would be the first to reach $1 trillion in market capitalization was answered when Apple reported strong Q2 results (which included $21 billion in stock buybacks) and its stock soared 9% this week, rising above the very round number and elevating its YTD gain to 23% (Amazon, with a market cap of just under $900 billion,...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.13% to 1.1522 CHF. EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, August 06(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates The US dollar edged higher against most of the major currencies, and emerging market currencies are heavier. Sterling’s quarter percent drop makes it the weakest of the majors in slow turnover and it was sufficient to record a new...

Neuchâtel, 6 August 2018 (FSO) – The hotel sector registered 18.4 million overnight stays in Switzerland in the first half of 2018, representing an increase of 3.8% (+670,000 overnight stays) compared with the same period a year earlier. With a total of 10.0 million overnight stays, foreign demand rose by 4.6% (+444,000). Domestic visitors registered 8.3 million overnight stays, i.e. an increase of 2.8% (+226,000)....

The Big Picture The diverging performance of major US stock market indexes which has been in place since the late January peak in DJIA and SPX has become even more extreme in recent months. In terms of duration and extent it is one of the most pronounced such divergences in history. It also happens to be accompanied by weakening market internals, some of the most extreme sentiment and positioning readings ever seen...