Tag Archives: Swiss National Bank

On April 28, the catalyst the sent the stock price of AAPL to its post-August 25 frash crash lows, and launched a tremor not only within the Nasdaq but the broader market, was news that after several years of being AAPL’s biggest cheerleader, even coming up with price targets north of $200, Carl Icahn had suddenly cooled on the China-focused growth company, and had liquidated his entire stake. But as Icahn was selling, or just before as we don’t know precisely when Icahn, who has since...

During the months of March and April of 2016 we released a series of proprietary research reports indicating signficant weakneses that we found in the European banking system and released it for sale through the blockchain (reference The First Bank Likely to Fall in the Great European Banking Crisis). This was performed by the same macro forensic and fundamental analysis team that first warned about the pan-European sovereign debt crisis in 2009 and 2010 (reference Pan-European...

“At the end of the day, negative interest rates are taxes in sheep’s clothing. Few economists would ever claim that raising taxes on households will stimulate spending. So why would they think negative interest rates will?” Those are the shocking words of St.Louis Fed Director of Research Christopher Waller whose brief note today will be required reading for everyone at The Bank of Japan, The ECB and every other central banker on the verge of NIRP… If you pick up any principles of...

Finanz und Wirtschaft, April 30, 2016. PDF. Ökonomenstimme, May 6, 2016. HTML. The winners and losers of the current monetary environment are not that easy to identify. Investors holding long-term, non-indexed debt gain as unexpectedly low inflation shifts wealth from borrowers to lenders. Governments suffer from increased real debt burdens and reduced revenue due to effectively lower capital income tax rates. Policies that succeed in affecting the real exchange rate entail...

The Swiss National Bank has achieved a profit of 5.7 billion CHF in Q1/2016. The total yield on assets per annum was 3.4%.The main contribution comes from gold with price change of 10% in this quarter, hence a total yield of 48%.The total yield on debt was positive with +0.2% thanks to negative interest rates.The deflationary environment let to rising bond prices. Bonds, make up 74% of the SNB portfolio. Here the details of our calculation: Position Total Positionin bn CHF % of Total...

The Q1/2016 update on the SNB investment strategy and its assets. The Swiss National Bank is a passive conservative investor. As opposed to other investors, the exposure in currencies is as important as the strategic asset allocation according asset classes (bonds, equities, cash, real estate).  The importance of currencies is one reason why the SNB is often called a hedge fund, the second the volatility of gains and losses.The SNB balance sheet looks as follows: In this post we will...

Nice sentence: Tears won’t be confined to Wall Street however: let’s not forget that none other than the Swiss National Bank is also long some 10.4 million shares of AAPL. First it was the banks reporting horrendous numbers — largely, we were told, because of their exposure to recently-cratered energy companies. Now it’s Big Tech, which is a much harder thing to explain. The FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) own their niches and not so long ago were expected to...

First it was the blow up of hedge fund darling Valeant that crushed countless funds who were long the name. Then, one month ago after the collapse of the Allergan-Pfizer deal, we showed (one of the reasons) why the hedge fund world continued to underperform the broader market: Allergan was one of the most widely held hedge fund stocks. And now, following the biggest Apple debacle in years, here is the reason why the hedge fund community is about to see even more redemption requests and...

In the NZZ, Thomas Fuster reports about a consequence of the introduction of new banknotes in Switzerland: Old notes become invalid after a transition period of 20 years. Nach der Emission des letzten Notenwerts einer neuen Serie kündigt die Schweizerische Nationalbank (SNB) jeweils den Rückruf der alten Serie an. Danach können die Banknoten zwar noch während zwanzig Jahren bei den Kassenstellen oder Agenturen der Nationalbank zum Nennwert umgetauscht werden. In der Folge sind die Noten...

The Bank of Japan and the ECB are assisting me in teaching the world’s savers, banking clients and corporations about the benefits of blockchain-based finance for the masses. How? Today, the Wall Street Journal published “Negative Rates: How One Swiss Bank Learned to Live in a Subzero World“: Alternative Bank Schweiz AG late last year became Switzerland’s first bank to comprehensively pass along negative rates to all of its customers. Violating an almost religious precept in the financial...