Fixed income

General Electric announced plans on Thursday to ax around a third of its Swiss workforce as the industrial conglomerate responds to a sharp fall in demand for fossil fuel power equipment.

GE aims to cut up to 1,400 jobs in Switzerland where it employs 4,200 people, but said no locations would close. According to French newspaper Les Echos, General Electric will cut 4 500 jobs in Switzerland, Germany and the UK. The cuts are associated with businesses, which General Electric acquired from France’s Alstom two years ago.

Nestlé Chief Executive Officer Mark Schneider made his biggest acquisition yet, agreeing to buy Canadian dietary supplements maker Atrium Innovations for $2.3 billion in a bid for growth beyond stagnating mainstream food brands.

The world’s biggest food company is acquiring Westmount, Quebec-based Atrium from an investor group led by Permira Funds, Nestlé said in a statement Tuesday. The Swiss owner of Nespresso and Lean Cuisine is paying cash for the Garden of Life supplement maker, whose 2017 sales are expected to approach $700 million.

Credit Suisse plans to complete its group restructuring in 2018, it said Thursday as it raised its 2018 profit target for its wealth-management and connected business in Asia-Pacific, and announced new guidance for 2019 and for 2020.

"Our teams remain strongly focused on driving value for our clients and shareholders through 2018 and our objective is to achieve a group reported return on tangible equity of between 10-11% for 2019 and between 11-12% for 2020," CEO Tidjane Thiam said in the statement.

Switzerland said Thursday it will provide more than a billion dollars in development aid to the European Union, as Bern seeks to stabilise its messy ties with Brussels.

The 1.3 billion Swiss francs ($1.32 billion, 1.1 billion euros) will be spread over ten years and will target lower income countries in central and eastern Europe, a statement said. The funds are "intended to reduce economic and social disparities in Europe, which is in Switzerland’s economic and political interest", it said.

Banks and financial institutions of particularly intrinsic importance to the global financial ecosystem are sometimes blithely referred to as "too big to fail".
A more sober term is ‘global systemically important banks’, or G-SIBs for short. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, at the 2009 G20 summit, an international body called the Financial Stability Board (FSB) was set up, its aim being to monitor the global financial system and make recommendations, when it deemed appropriate. The 2017 list was published on Tuesday and it makes for interesting reading.

Switzerland has once again taken the top spot in the World Talent Ranking, an annual rundown of the ability of countries to attract, develop, and retain top-performing staff.
Published on Monday by the IMD Business School in Lausanne, the report analyses over 60 countries according to various criteria important to professional workers, and finds that Switzerland comes out top overall for the fifth year in a row.

Credit Suisse is considering spreading its trading, investment-banking and wealth management activities across several European locations after Brexit, «Bloomberg» reported, citing three sources on condition of anonymity.Switzerland’s second-largest bank is considering moving the activities affected by Brexit to a number of European cities, instead of replacing London with one large alternative location.

According to a global study, terrorism-related fatalities fell for a second year in 2016, even though more countries in the West were affected by the shift in tactics toward so-called “Lone Wolf” attacks.

The fifth annual Global Terrorism Index, developed by the Institute for Economics and Peace think tank, showed that deaths from terrorism fell 13% to 25,673 last year, and were 22% lower than the 2014 peak.