Central Bank

Bank of Canada thinks now is a good time to research their own digital currency. Although the name remains unknown, they are not the first financial institution to contemplate such an approach.

Central bank digital currencies are a very unusual development in the financial sector. So far, no major bank has made any significant progress in developing such a currency. Bank of Canada may be the first to achieve some breakthrough in this regard. A paper has been circulating which focuses on creating a native digital currency.

Bitcoin’s price has levelled off at around $9,600 on Friday after the cryptocurrency lost almost $2,000 in less than 24 hours over Wednesday and Thursday. Despite the falls, bitcoin is still trading at almost ten times its value at the start of the year.

And according to the Bank of France Governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau, Bitcoin is a speculative asset and people who invest in it do so at their own risk.

This Monday I was at Lantern Fund Forum of Lugano, and the main speaker was John Mauldin. One of his main reflections was on how it is possible to manage money in a world where central banks and governments buy assets massively and indiscriminately, without assessing the value of what they buy.

Recent moves by the U.S. Federal Reserve to tighten its monetary policy is helping the Swiss National Bank in its campaign against the “highly valued” Swiss franc, SNB Governor Andrea Maechler said on Thursday.

Interest rate rises announced by the Fed “mean the interest rate differentials between Switzerland and other countries may widen further in the future,” Maechler said. This would make the Swiss franc less attractive to investors, reducing the value of the currency, whose strength has hampered Switzerland’s export-reliant economy.

In the morning SNB released the Swiss FX reserves for October. The Swiss National Bank’s foreign-currency reserves jumped by 17 billion Swiss francs ($17.04 billion) in the month, putting the central bank on track for another banner quarter after earning a record-high profit of 32.5 billion francs between July and September.

The data increased strongly to $741.5 billion from $724.4billion. Tuesday’s

Trump announces nomination of Fed board member Jerome Powell to be next chair of US central bank. A Fed governor since 2012 and former Treasury official under the George H.W. Bush administration, Powell will replace current Fed Chair Janet Yellen. Yellen was nominated in 2013 by President Obama. Her term as the central bank’s first female leader expires in February.

The European Central Bank on Thursday left interest rates unchanged at historic lows and said its bond-buying programme (quantitative easing, QE) would fall from the present rate of 60 billion euros a month to 30 billion from January to September.
It will continue at 60 billion a month until December. The purchases would continue at least until September 2018.

China will issue 2 billion U.S. dollars worth of dollar-denominated sovereign bonds on Thursday, China’s Ministry of Finance (MOF) said here on Wednesday.
China will issue the sovereign bonds in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), including 1 billion U.S. dollars of five-year bonds and 1 billion U.S. dollars of 10-year bonds.