Tag Archive: newslettersent

Saudi-Arabia: Peg or Banking Crisis?

2016-06-04

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2016-06-04

During the reign of the mighty petro-dollar standard, it was necessary for major oil exporters to recycle their dollar holdings back into the dollar-based financial system to maintain their self-imposed exchange rate pegs. US government bonds are the...

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Swiss Referendum: The new World of Bread and Circuses

2016-06-04

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2016-06-04

Swiss Referendum Minimum Income
9 out of 10 workers could be permanently replaced by robots. The working classes of Rome were put out of work by “robots,” too – slaves captured in Rome’s many successful conquests. Given the Swiss initiative for the minimum income, welcome to the world of bread and circuses!

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FX Daily, June 3: FX Market Shocked by Non-Farm Payrolls

2016-06-04

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2016-06-04

Massive surprise in the US job report was reflected in currency rates. The EUR/CHF surprisingly increased, despite weak US data. This reflects the fact that the ECB is currently considered the most dovish central bank. The dollar lost 2% against the yen, 1.6% against the euro and 1.3% vs. the Swiss franc.

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Twitter’s Other Growing Problem – A Surging Share Count

2016-06-04

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2016-06-04

It seems like almost everybody has an opinion about Twitter. As for the company it seems that their “window of opportunity” to massively succeed has essentially closed as user growth and revenue have both slowed, quite dramatically, over the past 18 months. Oddly, the strategy at Twitter seems to be not to thrive, but just to survive.

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Turning Stones Into Bread – The Japanese Miracle

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

  Stuffing the Futon Our friend Ramsey Su just asked what Haruhiko Kuroda and Shinzo Abe are going to do now in light of the strong yen (aside from perhaps doing the honorable thing). Isn’t it time to just “wipe out some debt with the stroke of a pen...

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Guided By Nonsense

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

  Seven Year Achievement   “Read the directions and directly you will be directed in the right direction.” — Lewis Carroll   See? It’s easy Janet! Just read the directions! Illustration credit: Walt Disney   U.S. consumers are at it again.  After a s...

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Three Political Events before the UK Referendum

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

“Every thinking person in America is  going to vote for you Governor Stevenson,” said an enthusiastic voter. “I am afraid that won’t do.  I need a majority,” reportedly quipped Stevenson (1952 or 1956).   The UK referendum on June 23 is the most important political event of the first half of the year.  A decision to …

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Switzerland GDP Q1 2016: +0.1 percent QoQ, +0.7 percent YoY

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

YoY Growth Swiss GDP
Q/Q GDP growth: +0.1%, YoY GDP growth: +0.7%. Until 2014, Swiss GDP was driven by net exports: Exports were rising more quickly than imports, which improved GDP. Positive change in the trade balance in goods: +8.1% YoY exports, +1.4% YoY imports in Q1/2016. Negative change in the trade balance for services: export +2.0%, import +6.7% YoY In 2015 and in Q1/2016 the main GDP drivers were consumption (+1.3% YoY in Q1/2016) and investment...

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Grasping Parasites and Bernie the Underdog

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

The system changed in 1971, when President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. Since then, the powers that be no longer depended on Congress… or savers…or voters… to raise the funds they needed. What about Bernie Sanders?

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OPEC’s Game within a Game

2016-06-02

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2016-06-02

The fact OPEC just agreed to agree on nothing in Vienna. What next? Lots of noise about collective output vs. country allocations.

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Notes from ECB Press Conference

2016-06-02

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2016-06-02

ECB press conference June 2 2016 Q; Risk to inflation balanced? April meeting, no conclusive evidence of second round effects, are they now? A; Additional stimulus beyond CSPP and TLTRO2 not necessary as we expect higher inflation. We do not see evid...

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FX Daily, June 2: Greenback Mostly Softer Ahead of ECB and ADP

2016-06-02

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2016-06-02

The US dollar remains under pressure.  It is off for the third day against the yen and slipped below JPY109 for the first time in a little more than two weeks.  The Nikkei struggled to cope with the foreign exchange developments, lost 2.3%, the most in a month, after gapping lower.  At JPY108.50, the dollar would … Continue reading...

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Swiss Retail Sales: -2.4 percent Y/Y nominal and Real -1.9 percent real

2016-06-02

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2016-06-02

Retail sales in several countries like Germany, Italy, Japan and Switzerland continue to fall. In the United States they have strongly risen recently. We should remind readers, that used goods sold via Ebay or similar, are not contained in this statistics. Still they create economic value for the purchases. By mentality, Swiss, Germans or Japanese pay more attention so that used goods do not lose their value so quickly.

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Claudio Grass Interviews Felix Zulauf

2016-06-02

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2016-06-02

Government Intervention is Making Things Worse. Claudio Grass, the CEO of Global Gold, has recently interviewed legendary Swiss fund manager Felix Zulauf.

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Can OPEC Surprise?

2016-06-01

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2016-06-01

OPEC ministers meet in Vienna tomorrow. Expectations could hardly be lower.  Attempts to agree on an output freeze were stymied by the Saudi’s insistence that is rival Iran participates as well.  Iran cannot agree to limit its production yet, or it would have sacrificed (or postponed) it nuclear program for nought.   Many observers have announced …

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FX Daily, June 1: Swiss SVME PMI strongest PMI

2016-06-01

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2016-06-01

The Swiss SVME PMI was the strongest PMI in this data release. It is driven by machinery and electronics industry. They strongly compete with the Germans, and got shocked by the end of the peg. Surprisingly they have outperformed in recent months.

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FX Daily, May 31: Sterling Slips and Aussie Pops as Investors Await Fresh Insight into Fed Trajectory

2016-06-01

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2016-06-01

The US dollar is broadly mixed.  The main narrative of increased prospects for a Fed hike in June or July has been pushed off center stage as the market reacts to local developments as investors await from US economic data.  Ostensibly the data...

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Arrant Star Trek Socialism

2016-05-31

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2016-05-31

  Robotic Utopia In spite of the fact that Marx expressed nothing but disdain for his Utopian socialist predecessors such as Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, variants of Utopian socialism evidently live on. The latest iteration of the socialist d...

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On the Road to Panicville

2016-05-31

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2016-05-31

  An Alert for the Global Posse of Liquidity Junkies In the summer of 2015 and again in December-February this year, global stock markets were rattled by weakness in the yuan’s exchange rate vs. the US dollar. Yuan weakness is widely held to exacerba...

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Economy “Improves”, Americans Get Poorer

2016-05-31

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2016-05-31

  No Surprises BALTIMORE – We were not surprised by the big news last week. We saw it coming. Figures from the Conference Board research group revealed productivity sinking for the first time in three decades. We promised to explain why it was such a...

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