Tag Archives: newslettersent

The Fed did, as expected, hike rates at their last meeting. And interestingly, interest rates have done nothing but fall since that day. As I predicted in the last BWER, Greenspan’s conundrum is making a comeback. The Fed can do whatever it wants with Fed funds – heck, barely anyone is using it anyway – but they can’t control what the market does with long term rates. At least not without making a commitment like the...

(ll) – Die Schweizerische Nationalbank (SNB) hat am Donnerstag ihren Geschäftsbericht publiziert und musste erneut heftige Kritik vor der Schweizer Unabhängigkeitspartei up! einstecken. up! kritisiert insbesondere die expansive Geldpolitik, die zu Fremdwährungsreserven von 692 Milliarden Franken geführt hat. Zudem fordert up! einen Übergang von der staatlichen Währung zu einem System von Marktwährungen. Die SNB hat in...

Gold and silver jumped another 1% overnight in Asia, building on the respective 1.5% and 2.2% gains seen last week. The ‘Trump trade’ is fading, impacting stock markets and risk off has returned to global markets with the Nikkei, S&P 500 futures and European stocks weakening. The precious metals had their second consecutive week of gains last week. Gold rose 1.5% and silver 2% while platinum rose 0.5% and palladium...

It’s time to start planning for what we’ll do when the current healthcare system implodes. As with many other complex, opaque systems in the U.S., only those toiling in the murky depths of the healthcare system know just how broken the entire system is. Only those dealing daily with the perverse incentives, the Kafkaesque procedures, the endlessly negative unintended consequences, the soul-deadening paper-shuffling, the...

  Swiss Franc Currency Index In the last week, the Swiss Franc index recovered and gained about 2%. The dollar index lost 1.5%, Trade-weighted index Swiss Franc, March 25(see more posts on Swiss Franc Index, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge Swiss Franc Currency Index (3 years) The Swiss Franc index is the trade-weighted currency performance (see the currency basket)On a three years interval, the...

This is why the Deep State is fracturing: its narratives no longer align with the evidence. As this chart from Google Trends illustrates, interest in the Deep State has increased dramatically in 2017. The term/topic has clearly moved from the specialist realm to the mainstream. I’ve been writing about the Deep State, and specifically, the fractures in the Deep State, for years. [embedded content] Amusingly, now that...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Switzerland extended its current account and trade surplus in Q4/2016 by 22%, helped by strong interventions by the Swiss National Bank.

The Swiss National Bank carried out foreign exchange interventions totaling 67.1B Swiss francs in 2016 in order to counter “an undesired tightening of monetary conditions,” the central bank disclosed in its annual report. That was down from 86.1B francs in 2015, when the SNB intervened heavily at the start of the year following its decision to remove a cap on the franc’s value against the euro. SNB Sight Deposits...

Summary: Swiss policymakers consider their domestic currency (the franc, or CHF) to be significantly overvalued. Measures taken by the Swiss National Bank seem to corroborate this stance, holding its nominal overnight rates well into negative territory. Considering where the Fed and ECB are in their policy cycles and where the SNB is in its cycle, the USD and EUR are likely to appreciate against the CHF. The CHF...

Swiss Franc EUR/CHF - Euro Swiss Franc, March 23(see more posts on EUR/CHF, ) - Click to enlarge FX Rates The gains the US dollar scored last month have been largely unwound against the major currencies. The dollar’s losses against the yen are a bit greater, and it returned to levels not seen late last November. The down draft in the dollar appears part of a larger development in the capital markets that has...