Tag Archives: newslettersent

Stretched to the Limit There are good reasons to suspect that the bull market in US equities has been stretched to the limit. These include inter alia: high fundamental valuation levels, as e.g. illustrated by the Shiller P/E ratio (a.k.a. “CAPE”/ cyclically adjusted P/E); rising interest rates; and the maturity of the advance. Near the end of a bull market cycle there is always the question of when a decline will...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.36% to 1.1634 CHF. EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, March 06(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates The resiliency of the status quo is again on display. After much chin wagging and finger pointing after the Italian elections and the modest decline in Italian assets, they have bounced back today. Italian bonds and stocks are participating...

Summary: The Canadian dollar has fallen ~7.5% against the Mexican peso this year. Mexico has much greater political risk than Canada. Be patient. Look for a reversal pattern nearer key support. This Great Graphic composed on Bloomberg shows the Canadian dollar against the Mexican peso since the start of last year. There have been three big moves. The Canadian dollar trended lower against the peso as it corrected from...

Companies in French-speaking Switzerland featured high up in the ranking. (Keystone) - Click to enlarge 23.3% of businesses in Switzerland did not pay their bills on time in 2017, found the business information service Bisnode D&Bexternal link in a survey published on Wednesday. That’s 0.3% less late-payers compared to 2016. The average delay of payments was also shorter in 2017, averaging 14.4 days,...

Just ahead of Sunday’s general election, there is little sign of appetite among the leading parties to tackle the significant challenges that Italy faces. The Italian general election campaign is in its final stretch before voting on 4 March. The election will take place under the new electoral law (Rosatellum bis), which allocates 37% of parliamentary seats via the principle of “first-past-the-post” and 61% via...

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by 0.18% to 1.1531 CHF. EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, March 02(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates The announcement of the US intention to impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum on national security grounds has sent ripples through the capital markets. Yet there is certainly more going on here than that. The tariffs,...

The first of the new trains completed its journey from Zurich to Bern – and back. (Keystone) After years of delay, the double-decker train named ‘FV-Dosto’ completed its first rail journey on Monday. The fate of the rest of the 62-train fleet still pends on a court decision following a legal challenge by disabled groups. “There was no delay, everything ran smoothly”, Swiss Federal Railways spokesperson Christian Ginsig...

Finding work that fits who you are is rarely easy, especially if you don’t fit into the mainstream, and usually it requires a lot of compromises, hard work and dead-ends. But that’s the process. Establishing a satisfying career is difficult in today’s economy, doubly so for those who find life within hierarchical institutions (corporate America and government) unrewarding, and triply so for those burdened with student...

A Finite Life Span We have been promising to get back to the topic of capital destruction, which we put on hiatus for the last several weeks to make our case that the interest rate remains in a falling trend. Today, we have a different way of looking at capital destruction. Socialism is the system of seeking out and destroying capital. Redistribution means taking someone’s capital and handing it over as income to...

Switzerland’s real gross domestic product (GDP) grew by an above-average 0.6% in the 4th quarter of 2017.1 Growth was broad-based across the various business sectors, with manufacturing, construction and most service sectors, particularly financial services, providing momentum. On the expenditure side, growth was underpinned by consumption and investment in construction but was hindered by investment in equipment and...