The recent run of Canadian strong economic figures was hard to ignore, as the Bank of Canada’s policy decisions are also a data-dependent, especially with the economy outperforming the Bank’s base case since October 2017.
The BoC raised rates to 1.25% from 1.00% last week, as solid employment growth and more solid inflation dampened the pressure of NAFTA unclarities.
Johann Schneider-Ammann, Switzerland’s economics minister, has said that the landlocked country should strive to "become the crypto-nation" if experiences in the Canton of Zug, colloquially known as Crypto Valley, remain positive. He made the comment in an interview with the news outlet SRF, as well as in a speech to the Crypto Finance Conference in St. Moritz, where he spoke after receiving a so-called "crypto award."
A latest Bloomberg survey shows economists expect Swiss National Bank (SNB) to raise rates only after the European Central Bank (ECB) begins tightening cycles. Thus, SNB is not seen raising rates before the fourth quarter of 2019.
US dollar weakness at the end of 2017 and the start of 2018 has made it clear that traders are going to have to be careful with dollar futures. On Friday, 12thJanuary 2018, the euro was trading at 1.2202 against the US dollar with an increase of 1.41% for the day (+0.0170). That the dollar is weakening seems odd as the Fed has clearly given forward guidance for three more interest rate increases in 2018. Given that, one would expect a stronger dollar especially as QT (Quantitative Tightening) has only begun.
The Bank of England will allow European banks to continue selling their services in the UK without having to create expensive subsidiaries after Brexit, even if no divorce deal is struck between London and Brussels, the BBC reported.
The Bank of England will not force European-based investment banks to ringfence their capital and liquidity. It will mean EU banks operating through UK branches can continue without creating subsidiaries – where they are compelled to hold their own substantial reserves in the event of a financial shock, essentially becoming UK companies.
The chairman of Swiss banking giant UBS said in an interview published Sunday that he does not consider the soaring cryptocurrency bitcoin as money and called for regulators to intervene.
"In my opinion, bitcoins are not money," Axel Weber, chairman of Swiss financial giant UBS, said in an interview to Swiss news agency NZZ am Sonntag on Sunday.
Did you know that one of the most popular keywords in the Google searches last month, was “yield curve flattening”? There is a lot of discussion these weeks about the narrowing spread between the long and short term maturities in the Treasury Notes yields.
Such a spread has shrunk at the lowest levels since 2007. Why is this a cause of concern? The yield curve is the difference in reward the investors receive for locking their investments for longer periods of time, which means greater uncertainty. A compensation for investors who tolerate the extra risk is usually called risk premium. But when such premium fades away then the yield curve is flat, when the spread is negative, the curve is inverted.
The Swiss National Bank maintained its ultra-loose monetary policy stance on Thursday, saying it would keep its negative interest rates in place to combat the "highly valued" Swiss franc.
The SNB kept the target range for its benchmark three-month interest rate at minus 1.25 percent to minus 0.25 percent, in line with expectations of analysts polled by Reuters.
