Tag Archive: newsletter

FX Daily, January 8: Hopes of De-Escalation Help Markets Stabilize

2020-01-08

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2020-01-08

The Iranian retaliatory missile strike on Iraqi-bases housing US forces initially sparked a dramatic risk-off response throughout the capital markets. The muted response by the US coupled with signals from Tehran that it had "concluded" its proportionate measures saw the markets retrace the initial reaction. It was too late for equities in the Asia Pacific region, and several markets (Japan, China, Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand) fell more than 1%.

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Swiss rents fall but property prices increase in 2019

2020-01-08

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2020-01-08

Rents in Switzerland fell by an average of 0.5% last year but some regions bucked the trend. Last year was a good one for tenants, according to the Swiss Real Estate Offer Indexexternal link, which was published on Tuesday. December alone saw rents dropping 0.4% on average. The most significant drops were in central Switzerland (-1.7%), the Lake Geneva region (-1.1%) and northwestern Switzerland (-0.9%).

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More Trends That Ended 2019 The Wrong Way

2020-01-08

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2020-01-08

US Trade, SA 2016-2019
Auto sales in 2019 ended on a skid. Still, the year as a whole wasn’t nearly as bad as many had feared. Last year got off on the wrong foot in the aftermath of 2018’s landmine, with auto sales like consumer spending down pretty sharply to begin it. Spending did rebound in mid-year if only somewhat, enough, though, to add a little more to the worst-is-behind-us narrative which finished off 2019.

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The S&P’s Biggest Bear Capitulates

2020-01-08

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2020-01-08

First it was Dennis Gartman shutting down his newsletter after more than three decades, lamenting a market that no longer made any sense (a lament shared by Deutsche Bank's Aleksanda Kocic), and now the market's QE4-driven meltup has forced Wall Street's biggest sellside bear to capitulate on his November call that the market will drop in 2020; instead UBS' head of US equity strategy, Francois Trahan, has joined the bullish herd hiking his year-end...

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Gold’s New Bull Market and Why $7,000 Per Ounce Is “Logical” (Part I)

2020-01-08

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2020-01-08

◆ Gold could rise to more than $7,000 an ounce according to respected MoneyWeek contributor and fund manager Charlie Morris (Part I today and Part II tomorrow). A year ago, in my occasional free newsletter, Atlas Pulse, I upgraded gold – which was trading at $1,239 an ounce at that point – to “bull market” status for the first time since 2012.

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FX Daily, January 7: Geopolitical Angst Eases, Helps Equities and Underpins the Greenback

2020-01-07

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2020-01-07

Overview: Without fresh escalation, investors cannot maintain a heightened sense of geopolitical anxiety.  The recovery of US shares yesterday set the tone for today's rebound in Asia and Europe. All the equity markets in the Asia Pacific region rallied today, led by a 1.6% rally in Japan and a nearly 1.4% advance in Australia, with the exception of Taiwan.

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Swiss Consumer Price Index in December 2019: +0.2 percent YoY, +0.4 percent MoM

2020-01-07

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2020-01-07

Switzerland Consumer Price Index (CPI) YoY, December 2019
07.01.2020 - The consumer price index (CPI) remained stable in December 2019 compared with the previous month, remaining at 101.7 points (December 2015 = 100). Inflation was +0.2% compared with the same month of the previous year. The average annual inflation reached +0.4% in 2019.These are the results of the Federal Statistical Office (FSO).

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Hoher Gewinn der SNB weckt Begehrlichkeiten

2020-01-07

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2020-01-07

Am nächsten Donnerstag publiziert die Schweizerische Nationalbank (SNB) ihr Finanzergebnis für das Jahr 2019. Sie dürfte gemäss den Berechnungen der UBS für das Gesamtjahr einen Gewinn von rund CHF 50 Mrd. erzielt haben, im Schlussquartal resultierte hingegen ein Verlust von rund CHF 1 Mrd. Bund und Kantone können mit einer Auszahlung von CHF 2 Mrd. rechnen.

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Manufacturing Clears Up Bond Yields

2020-01-07

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2020-01-07

Federal Reserve Regional Manu. PMI, 2016-2019
Yesterday, IHS Markit reported that the manufacturing turnaround its data has been suggesting stalled. After its flash manufacturing PMI had fallen below 50 several times during last summer (only to be revised to slightly above 50 every time the complete survey results were tabulated), beginning in September 2019 the index staged a rebound jumping first to 51.1 in that month.

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Gold Surges To Test $1,600/oz, Oil Over $70, Stocks Fall on Risks of World War In Middle East

2020-01-07

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2020-01-07

Hot Havens, 2013-2019
◆ Gold has surged to test $1,600 per ounce, up 4% so far in 2020 and building on the stellar near 18.9% gain in 2019 ◆ Gold is testing it’s highest levels since 2013 as investors diversify into gold; Goldman, Citi and other gold analysts are advocating gold bullion as important hedge in crisis ◆ Oil prices have surged with Brent crude reaching $70 per barrel; concern over oil supplies from Iran, Iraq and other nations as U.S. State Department warns...

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Conservation in the Free Market

2020-01-07

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2020-01-07

It should be no news by this time that intellectuals are fully as subject to the vagaries of fashion as are the hemlines of women’s skirts. Apparently, intellectuals tend to be victims of a herd mentality. Thus, when John Kenneth Galbraith published his best-selling The Affluent Society in 1958, every intellectual and his brother was denouncing America as suffering from undue and excessive affluence; yet, only two or three years later, the fashion...

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FX Daily, January 6: Markets Struggling to Stabilize to Start the New Week

2020-01-06

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2020-01-06

Overview: The global capital markets have yet to stabilize amid heightened geopolitical tension. Even though the US stock market finished last week off its lows, the sell-off continued in the Asia Pacific region. Japan's markets re-opened after an extended holiday, and the yen, at three-month highs, saw the Nikkei sell-off nearly 2%. Several markets in the region lost over 1%, including Taiwan, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. Europe's Dow Jones...

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FX Weekly Preview: High-Frequency Data may Underscore Four Thematic Points

2020-01-06

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2020-01-06

Full liquidity returns to the markets gradually in the coming days, and the week ahead culminates with the US December employment report.  The highlights include the service and composite PMI readings,  and December eurozone and China's CPI.  The UK reports December PMIs,  November GDP, and industrial output figures.

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Swatch offers compromise in watch movements deadlock

2020-01-06

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2020-01-06

Switzerland’s largest watch maker, Swatch, says it will limit the number of movements it makes for the industry in a bid to end a long-running stand-off with the anti-trust regulator. At the end of last year, the Competition Commission (Comco) temporarily suspended deliveries of watch movements from Swatch’s ETA unit to big rivals from January 1, 2020.

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Is This “The Top”?

2020-01-06

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2020-01-06

Apple, Operating income, 2006-2019
Parabolic moves end when the confidence that the parabolic move can't end becomes the consensus. The consensus seems to be that the stock market is on its way to much higher levels, and soon. The near-term targets for the S&P 500 (SPX, currently around 3,235) range from 3,500 to 4,000, with longer-term targets reaching "the sky's the limit."

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EM Preview for the Week Ahead

2020-01-06

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2020-01-06

While the global economic backdrop remains favorable for EM, rising geopolitical risks will be a growing headwind. The EM VIX surged above 18% Friday as Iran tensions escalated, the highest since early December. With these tensions likely to persist, EM may remain under some pressure for the time being. High oil prices are positive for the exporters in Latin America and the Middle East but negative for the importers in Asia and Eastern Europe.

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Why Paternalists Keep Calling Us “Irrational”

2020-01-06

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2020-01-06

Some economists, such as the 2017 Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and his colleague Cass Sunstein, have proposed an unusual justification for government interference with people’s choices. They do not intend, they say, to override the preferences that people have. They don’t want to tell people what they “should” want, according to an external standard that people don’t accept. They claim, however, that accepting the actual preferences people have...

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Facebook’s Libra has failed, says Switzerland’s president

2020-01-05

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2020-01-05

Facebook’s plan to launch its digital currency Libra is unlikely to succeed Ueli Maurer, Switzerland’s president, told SRF. Maurer doesn’t think central banks will accept the basket of currencies underpinning the cryptocurrency. “The project, in this form, has thus failed” he said.

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Why the Minimum Wage Is so Bad for Young Workers

2020-01-05

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2020-01-05

In today’s political discourse, the minimum wage is frequently mentioned by the more progressive members of Congress. On a basic level, raising the minimum wage appears to be a sympathetic policy for low-income wage earners. Often kept out of the conversation, however, are the downstream effects of this proposal.

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Revolutionary idea to store green power for the grid

2020-01-05

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2020-01-05

Stacking blocks of concrete with a crane to store energy and use the force of gravity to keep producing electricity when renewable sources are lacking: simple but revolutionary, the battery solution proposed by the Ticino start-up Energy Vault is attracting investors and customers from around the world.

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