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.
Swiss employers are expecting an upswing in recruitment in the first three months of 2018, the most upbeat they have been for seven years, a survey showed Tuesday.
The report by the Swiss recruitment agency Manpower consulted 759 employers, predicting the outlook for recruitment in the first quarter of 2018 to be three percent, the most optimistic forecast since the first quarter of 2011.
Representatives of two Swiss banks that offer bitcoin products, Falcon Private Bank and Vontobel Holding AG, are high on bitcoin’s future due to the pending introductions of bitcoin futures in the U.S., according to Bloomberg. The banks believe the futures contracts will usher in more digital currency products.
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.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) on Wednesday said it is taking local units of GlaxoSmithKline and Swiss healthcare company Novartis to court over false or misleading representations in the marketing of pain relief products.
It claims they represented Osteo Gel on its packaging and online as specifically formulated for treating osteoarthritis and was more effective than Emulgel, when they had identical formulas.
Swiss Federal prosecutors said on Monday that the Swiss authorities were examining information provided by banks about possible suspicious transactions related to Saudi accounts.
The comments came in response to a report published in the Financial Times, which quoted unnamed sources who claimed that the Swiss banks began reporting suspicious activities within the accounts of some Saudi clients.
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.
The EU has named and shamed 17 states in publishing the bloc’s first ever tax haven blacklist and put a further 47 states on notice, including four British overseas territories and crown dependencies. The decision was made at a meeting of finance ministers in Brussels as EU authorities move to counter tax avoidance and evasion – having urged dozens of nations to make greater commitments to transparency over the past year.
