Tag Archive: newsletter

Swiss visit doctor less often than most of Europe

2019-12-21

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2019-12-21

In 2017, an average Swiss resident visited a medical professional 4.32 times, according to data recently published by Eurostat. Only residents of Denmark (4.30), Sweden (2.77) and Cyprus (2.09) went to see a doctor less often. The average number of visits across those European countries with 2017 data was 6.84.

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Parliament rubber stamps free trade deal with Indonesia

2019-12-21

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2019-12-21

The Swiss parliament has given the go-ahead for a free trade deal with Indonesia, although not without debates about sustainability and the Asian country’s production of palm oil. Almost exactly a year after the deal was signed between the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and Indonesia, the Swiss parliament gave its green light on Thursday.

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Corporate Debt Time Bomb

2019-12-21

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2019-12-21

US Non-Financial Corporate Debt as Percent of GDP, 1955-2019
While I have reportedly highlighted the many risks of the current monetary policy direction and the multiple distortions that it has created in the markets, in the economy, and even in society, one of the most pressing dangers of the unnaturally low rates and cheap money is the staggering accumulation of debt. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the ballooning corporate debt, especially in the US.

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Everything Comes Down To Which Way The Dollar Is Leaning

2019-12-21

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2019-12-21

Rising Dollar Squeeze
Is the global economy on the mend as everyone at least here in America is now assuming? For anyone else to attempt to answer that question, they might first have to figure out what went wrong in the first place. Most have simply assumed, and continue to assume, it has been fallout from the “trade wars.”

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Consumer Preferences Are Harder to Measure than the Behavioral Economists Think

2019-12-21

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2019-12-21

A recent paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (JCP) has started a debate on the accuracy of "loss aversion," the idea that people are driven by fear of losses more than they are by the potential for gain. Core to behavioral economics, this idea has been rather universally accepted and been part of the awarding of two economics Nobel Prizes, in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman and in 2017 to Richard Thaler.

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Rosenblatt Goes Full Bear On Apple With $150 Target As China iPhone Sales Slump

2019-12-20

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2019-12-20

Apple sales, 2017-2020
Rosenblatt Securities analyst Jun Zhang maintained a sell rating on Apple with a price target of $150 per share, citing a decline in iPhone sales in China is leading to a wave of production cuts by the company. "Based on our recent channel checks, we believe Apple's total iPhone sales in China were down ~-30% y/y in November," said Zhang in a note to clients on Tuesday.

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Skyrocketing Costs Will Pop All the Bubbles

2019-12-20

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2019-12-20

Wages aren't keeping up
The reckoning is coming, and everyone who counted on "eternal growth of borrowing" to stave off the reckoning is in for a big surprise. We've used a simple trick to keep the status quo from imploding for the past 11 years: borrow whatever it takes to keep paying the skyrocketing costs for housing, healthcare, college, childcare, government, permanent wars and so on.

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The Strongest Seasonal Advance in Precious Metals Begins Now

2019-12-20

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2019-12-20

Plans and Consequences. You are probably already getting into the holiday spirit, perhaps you are even under a little stress. But the turn of the year will soon be here – an occasion to review the past year and make plans for the new one. Many people are doing just that – and their behavior is creating the strongest seasonal rally in the precious metals markets.

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OK Boomer, OK Fed

2019-12-20

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2019-12-20

Student Loans Owned and Securitized, Outstanding 2008-2018
Eventually the younger generations will connect all the economic injustices implicit in 'OK Boomer' with the Fed. Much of the cluelessness and economic inequality behind the OK Boomer meme is the result of Federal Reserve policies that have favored those who already own the assets (Boomers) that the Fed has relentlessly pumped higher, to the extreme disadvantage of younger generations who were not given the opportunity to buy assets cheap and ride...

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Outlook 2020 | Buy Gold and Silver To Hedge Massive Risks including U.S. ‘Insolvency’

2019-12-20

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2019-12-20

Buy gold and silver to hedge risks in 2020. IG interview Mark O’Byrne of GoldCore With late cycle risks and concerns about global growth, many Wall Street analysts are increasingly bullish on gold. Mark O’Byrne, founder at GoldCore spoke to IGTV’s Victoria Scholar about the outlook for gold in 2020.He explained why most analysts including GoldCore are optimistic on both gold and silver.

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FX Daily, December 19: Whiff of Inflation in the Air

2019-12-19

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2019-12-19

It is risky to read too much into the price action in holiday-thin markets, but inflation fears are beginning to surface. The price of January WTI is around $61, having tested $50 a barrel in Q3. The CRB Index made new highs for the year yesterday and is up almost 9% for the year. The US yield curve (2-10 year) has been steepening after being inverted for a few days in August, and now at nearly 29 bp, also is new highs for the year.

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Swiss Trade Balance November 2019: Foreign trade continues to contract

2019-12-19

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2019-12-19

Swiss exports and imports, seasonally adjusted (in bn CHF), November 2019
As in the previous month, cross-border flows of goods fell in both directions of traffic in November 2019. In seasonally adjusted terms, exports fell 1.7% on a month compared to 1.1% for imports. Swiss sales fell back to their level at the start of 2019, while admissions fell by almost a billion francs. The trade balance closed with a surplus of 2.2 billion francs.

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Swiss railways are becoming safer, new figures show

2019-12-19

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2019-12-19

There has been a fall in the number of accidents and fatalities on the Swiss railways, according to new national figures. On Tuesday, the Federal Statistical Office reported a total of 70 rail accidents and 14 deaths in 2018. This is the lowest number of annual fatalities since 2011. In the 2000s there were between 200 and 282 reported accidents each year and 20-40 deaths, excluding suicides on the Swiss rail network.

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Poverty in Switzerland rises 10 percent in a year 

2019-12-19

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2019-12-19

Although Switzerland is rich, poverty within the country continues to rise, says a report released on Tuesday. Poverty affected 675,000 people including 100,000 children in 2017, a 10% increase on the previous year, according to the report (in French) by the non-governmental organisation Caritas.

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Latest European Sentiment Echoes Draghi’s Last Take On Global Economic Risks

2019-12-19

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2019-12-19

Germany Economy, 2016-2019
While sentiment has been at best mixed about the direction of the US economy the past few months, the European economy cannot even manage that much. Its most vocal proponent couldn’t come up with much good to say about it – while he was on his way out the door. At his final press conference as ECB President on October 24, Mario Draghi had to acknowledge (sort of) how he is leaving quite the mess for Christine Lagarde.

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Where’s the Inflation? It’s in Stocks, Real Estate, and Higher Ed

2019-12-19

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2019-12-19

Increases in Spending and Prices 2009 through 2018
In my days before I worked for the Mises Institute, I had a colleague who knew I associated with Austrian-School economists. In the wake of the bailouts and quantitative easing that followed the 2008 financial crisis, he'd sometimes crack "where's all that inflation you Austrians keep talking about?"

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Hard Brexit Redux?

2019-12-19

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2019-12-19

The risks of a hard Brexit are perhaps higher than markets appreciated. Here, we set forth some possible scenarios as to what may unfold after the January 31 deadline. Uncertainty is likely to be protracted and markets hate uncertainty. As such, we see UK assets continuing to underperform.

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Fed Is Monetizing 90 percent of U.S. Deficit to Keep Interest Rates from Rising and Crashing Markets

2019-12-19

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2019-12-19

Effective Fed Funding of National Debt, 2019
By Daniel R. Amerman, CFAAs can be seen in the graph above, for the last 12 weeks there has been a stunning visual correlation between the yellow bars of the total weekly funding of deficits by the Federal Reserve, and the green bars of the weekly deficit spending by the United States government.

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