Tag Archive: newsletter

Swiss Retail Sales, February 2019: -0.2 percent Nominal and -0.2 percent Real

2019-04-01

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2019-04-01

Switzerland Retail Sales YoY, February 2019
Turnover in the retail sector fell by 0.2% in nominal terms in February 2019 compared with the previous year. Seasonally adjusted, nominal turnover rose by 0.2% compared with the previous month. These are provisional findings from the Federal Statistical Office (FSO).

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FX Weekly Preview: The Green Shoots of Spring

2019-04-01

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2019-04-01

Investors have worked themselves into a lather. Equities crashed in Q4 last year amid on corporate earnings and concerns about growth. The Fed’s tightening decision in December was made unanimously. The above-trend growth, the preferred inflation measure was near target, unemployment was the lowest in a generation and real rates were historically low.

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The Fed Guarantees No Recession for 10 Years, Permanent Uptrend for Stocks and Housing

2019-04-01

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2019-04-01

SPX, future 2003 - 2029
A classified Federal Reserve memo sheds new light on the Fed's confidence in its control of the economy and the stock and housing markets. In effect, the Fed is guaranteeing that there will be no recession for another 10 years, and that stocks and housing will remain in a permanent uptrend.

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Swiss expat community hits 760,000

2019-04-01

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2019-04-01

Swiss Abroad 2018
The number of Swiss Abroad citizens grew by 1.1% to reach 760,200 at the end of last year. Most live in neighbouring countries and in the United States.The expatriate community accounts for 10.6% of the total number of Swiss nationals, according to official statistics published on Thursday. Nearly three-quarters of the Swiss Abroad have dual nationality.

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Almost 60,000 Swiss dwellings unoccupied last year

2019-03-31

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2019-03-31

A significant increase in vacant homes is predicted by Zurich Cantonal Bank. Suburbs are particularly prone to lower occupancy levels. The problem of empty housing, particularly in the urban periphery, is likely to worsen, with construction activity concentrated in areas with already high vacancy rates. Last year around 59,700 homes did not have any tenants.

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Monthly Macro Monitor – March 2019 (VIDEO)

2019-03-31

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2019-03-31

Alhambra CEO discusses all the talk about the recent yield curve inversion and how he views it.

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Growth forecast lowered for Swiss economy

2019-03-31

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2019-03-31

Worsening international conditions will have a negative impact on Switzerland’s export-driven economy, prompting the Swiss Economic Institute (KOF) to lower its forecast for this year. KOF on Wednesday announced it had revised its growth forecast down from 1.6% to 1% for Switzerland’s gross domestic product. However, the latest outlook for 2020 remains virtually unchanged with growth of 2.1%.

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Two Junior Miners Offering Arbitrage Opportunities – an Interview with Jayant Bhandari

2019-03-31

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2019-03-31

Maurice Jackson of Proven & Probable has just conducted another interview with Jayant Bhandari, who is known to long-time readers as a frequent guest author on this site. Below is a video of the interview as well as a link for downloading the transcript of the interview in PDF form. But first here is a list of the topics discussed.

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Facebook rejects most information requests from Swiss authorities

2019-03-30

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2019-03-30

Over the first three months of 2018 Switzerland’s authorities made 80 requests for Facebook user data, however two thirds of them were rejected, according to the newspaper SonntagsBlick as reported in 20 Minutes. When the requests were urgent the response rate rose to two thirds of requests.

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Public transport enjoys another record year among tourists

2019-03-30

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2019-03-30

Foreign visitors spent 6.4% more on Swiss Travel System tickets in 2018 than in the previous year. Sales rose to over CHF130 million ($131 million). 2018 is thus the sixth record year in a row, the Swiss Federal Railways said on Tuesday. Chinese guests were the top foreign users of public transport, with sales of CHF20.3 million, an increase of 14.9%.

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Apple’s Rotten Core

2019-03-30

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2019-03-30

Entering commoditized, fiercely competitive low-margin services cannot substitute for the high-margin profits that will be lost as global recession and saturation erode iPhone sales. Apple has always been equally an enterprise and a secular religion. The Apple Faithful do not tolerate heretics or critics, and non-believers "just don't get it."

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Brexit and Learning To “Live With Boom and Bust Economic Cycles”

2019-03-30

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2019-03-30

Generations of people have learned to live with boom and bust economic cycles. Years of relative plenty were followed, as night follows day, by grief including high unemployment and forced emigration on a large scale. In fact, if you go back much beyond the late 1960s, it would not be too cynical to say the cycles were often more about going from bust to really busted, as for decades the country was hit by crippling rates of largely enforced...

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FX Daily, March 29: Equities Bounce While Bonds Pullback to End Q1

2019-03-29

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2019-03-29

The global growth scare may be subsiding. It had been fanned by the ECB and Fed statements and projections. Poor US jobs growth reported in early March and the poor flash EMU PMI late in the month contributed.  The slowdown in China and the flurry of measures to combat it also had a role.

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Swiss Rail shares bumper profits with passengers

2019-03-29

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2019-03-29

In 2018, Swiss Rail made a profit of CHF 568 million, 42.5% more than in 2017. Part of the rise was due to higher than average spending on maintenance in 2017. It is worth noting that Swiss Rail receives a large sum from taxpayers every year. In 2018, the company received CHF 3.5 billion of public funding, CHF 2.7 billion of it booked as income.

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Watchdog confirms illegal activity by cryptocurrency firm Envion

2019-03-29

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2019-03-29

An investigation by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has revealed the that Zug-based cryptocurrency venture Envion unlawfully received deposits from at least 37,000 investors. Envion unlawfully accepted over CHF90 million ($90.5 million) in its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) without the necessary statutory licence, according to a statement by FINMAexternal link on Wednesday.

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Is the World Becoming Wealthier or Poorer?

2019-03-29

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2019-03-29

There is nothing intrinsically profitable about either robotics or AI. At the request of colleague/author Douglas Rushkoff (his latest book is Team Human), I'm publishing last week's Musings Report, which was distributed only to subscribers and patrons of the site.) The core assumption of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and other plans to redistribute wealth and income more broadly is that the world is becoming wealthier, and so the pool of income and...

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Dépossession. Des politiques monétaires mortifères…

2019-03-28

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2019-03-28

Liquidity ratio 2015-2017
L’économie du pays est promise à un effondrement. Il suffit pour s’en convaincre de voir la quantité de surfaces commerciales disponibles. En Suisse, près de 1200 entreprises ont fait faillite entre janvier et février! L’information du jour est un non-évènement, puisque annoncé de longue date sur ce site. Par ailleurs, elle ne semble intéresser personne à Berne, dans les « agglomérations », ou autres »Régions ».

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FX Daily, March 28: Brexit Uncertainty Deepens as Parliament is Divided, while Turkey’s Short Squeeze Falters

2019-03-28

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2019-03-28

The lurch lower in global interest rates continue. The US 10-year yield is at new 15-month lows, five basis points through the average effective Fed funds rate. Late yesterday, it appeared that 10-year German Bund yields slipped below similar Japanese government bond yields for the first time since Q4 16, but when the JGB market opened, it the 10-year JGB yield fell a couple more basis points to minus 10, the most negative since August 2016.

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Swiss chocolate consumption slides

2019-03-28

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2019-03-28

In 2018, Switzerland’s population consumed around 87,000 tonnes of chocolate. However, average chocolate consumption dropped from 10.5 kg per person in 2017 to 10.3 kg in 2018, a decline of roughly 2%. This decline reflects last year’s longer hotter summer, according to the industry association Chocosuisse.

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Monthly Macro Monitor: Well Worried

2019-03-28

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2019-03-28

Yield Curve and Lending Standards 1990-2018
Don’t waste your time worrying about things that are well worried. Well worried. One of the best turns of phrase I’ve ever heard in this business that has more than its fair share of adages and idioms. It is also one of the first – and best – lessons I learned from my original mentor in this business. The things you see in the headlines, the things everyone is already worried about, aren’t usually worth fretting over.

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