Tag Archives: Swiss National Bank

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke. Reportage in The Wall Street Journal on April 4th states that “A fund owned by China’s foreign-exchange regulator has been taking stakes in some of the country’s biggest banks, raising speculation that it may be a new member of the so-called ‘national team’ of investors the Chinese government unleashes to support its stock market.” Statists and interventionists around the world (read: `those who...

Investec Switzerland. The Swiss National Bank won’t rule out another interest rate cut, though any measure must be weighed with a view to its potential side effects, Governing Board Member Andrea Maechler said. © Yulan | Dreamstime.com “We’re always looking into other options, if needed — we’re looking into all of them,” Maechler said at an event for financial professionals in Zurich on Thursday. “We’re not excluding any of them, including a possible further reduction in...

I attended a panel discussion on private blockchains in banking at UBS in NYC last night. There were two overarching misconceptions that appeared to permeate the discussions: Counterparties can be trusted, hence you can build reliable systems with trusted parties, and; Capital markets are, and always will be predicated upon the legacy, highly centralized hub and spoke model that we know today. Basically, the influential gatekeepers that control access to a centralized, authoritative...

While Forex banks, traders, and other institutions are being blamed for market rigging, the Swiss National Bank can publish reports about its own market rigging, but instead of being a scandal, it's economic data.  That's because the vast majority don't understand how the Forex markets work.  It's not insulting - it's a fact.  Currently there are hundreds of pending litigation cases against a plethora of Forex banks, traders, and other institutions - but none against a central bank.  Of...

While Forex banks, traders, and other institutions are being blamed for market rigging, the Swiss National Bank can publish reports about its own market rigging, but instead of being a scandal, it’s economic data.  That’s because the vast majority don’t understand how the Forex markets work.  It’s not insulting – it’s a fact.  Currently there are hundreds of pending litigation cases against a plethora of Forex banks, traders, and other institutions – but none against a central bank....

Rising. Source: SNB. The series “in EUR” is based on the author’s calculations. Note: The exchange rate floor vis-a-vis the Euro was in place from 6 September 2011 until 15 January 2015.

By now it is common knowledge that when it comes to massive, taxpayer-backed hedge funds, few are quite as big as the Swiss National Bank, whose roughly $100 billion in equity holdings have been extensively profiled on these pages, including its woefully investments in Valeant and the spike in its buying of AAPL stock at its all time high. But while the SNB's stock holdings are updated every quarter courtesy of its informative SEC-filed 13F (we wish the Fed would also disclose the equities...

Submitted by Ronan Manly of Bullionstar Blogs Following on from last month in which BullionStar’s Koos Jansen broke the news that Venezuela had sent almost 36 tonnes of its gold reserves to Switzerland at the beginning of the year, “Venezuela Exported 36t Of Its Official Gold Reserves To Switzerland In January“, there have now been further interesting developments in this ongoing saga. It has now come to light that on Tuesday 8 March, the Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) sent another 12.5...

Submitted by Ronan Manly of Bullionstar Blogs Following on from last month in which BullionStar’s Koos Jansen broke the news that Venezuela had sent almost 36 tonnes of its gold reserves to Switzerland at the beginning of the year, “Venezuela Exported 36t Of Its Official Gold Reserves To Switzerland In January“, there have now been further interesting developments in this ongoing saga. It has now come to light that on Tuesday 8 March, the Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) sent another...

Yesterday when summarizing the Fed's action we said that in its latest dovish announcement which has sent the USD to a five month low, the Fed clearly sided with China which desperately wants a weaker dollar to which it is pegged (reflected promptly in the Yuan's stronger fixing overnight) at the expense of Europe and Japan, both of which want the USD much stronger. ECB, BOJ don't want a weak dollar; China does not want a strong dollarFed sides with China for now — zerohedge (@zerohedge)...