Switzerland

Switzerland’s market for legal cannabis with just 1 percent THC is taking off as producers are having trouble keeping up with demand and the number of registered retailers has grown significantly in the last year, according to a report from Reuters. Authorities expect sales upwards of $30 million this year, but admit even that is a conservative estimate.

KannaSwiss, a low-THC cannabis wholesaler, has quadrupled its staff to 20 since last year but co-founder Corso Serra di Cassano said the company is still having trouble keeping up with orders.

Falcon Private Bank, one of the Swiss banks ensnared in the Malaysian corruption scandal surrounding the troubled 1MDB fund, lost 128 million Swiss francs ($130 million) last year, as it reported in the statement on Thursday.

Last October the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) ordered the closure of its Singapore branch due to anti-money laundering (AML) failings in connection with 1MDB. The bank paid a composition fine of $300,000 for breaches of AML requirements and the regulator told the bank to strengthen its controls.

Credit Suisse increased its bonus pool by 6%, defying a trend toward smaller payouts at many of its peers in an effort to prevent an exodus of talent from its investment banking and Asian operations. That followed a second straight year in the red for the bank amid a major restructuring and steep penalties for the sale of toxic mortgage debt in the run-up to the financial crisis.

CEO Tidjane Thiam’s pay for his first full year in the job swelled to 11.9 million Swiss francs ($12 million), the 2016 annual report of Switzerland’s second-biggest bank showed on Friday. This compared with the 4.57 million francs he earned in 2015 after joining the bank on June 22.

UBS, the world’s biggest wealth manager, will impose a penalty charge on customers who park euros with the bank, a reaction to the negative interest rate environment in the euro zone.

The Swiss bank, the world’s largest wealth manager, will introduce from May an annual fee of 0.6% on accounts with more than €1 million ($1.1 mln). The charge will apply to total amounts held by individual customers and be calculated on a daily basis. It comes in response to the ultra-low or negative European Central Bank rates, in the wake of the financial crisis, which have eaten into banks’ margins. UBS currently imposes an individual deposit charge for large account balances held in Swiss francs by corporate, institutional and certain very wealthy clients, as it deals with negative interest rates charged by the Swiss National Bank.

Switzerland’s central bank bought another 67.1 billion Swiss francs ($67.6 billion) worth of foreign currencies in 2016, almost a quarter less than the previous year, in its effort to fight the appreciation of the safe-haven franc. The sum, published in the central bank’s annual report on Thursday, compares with a 2015 tally of 86.1 billion francs and a record of 188 billion spent in 2012.
"These interventions occurred mainly at times of heightened uncertainty, when the Swiss franc was particularly sought after as a safe investment," the Swiss National Bank said in its annual report published on Thursday.

When it comes to achieving affordable, environmentally sustainable and secure energy systems, a group of small economies is quickly accelerating away from the rest of the world. The top 20 performers in the fifth annual Global Energy Architecture Performance Index Report 2017 have achieved twice the average increase in their score compared to that of all other countries.
The report, developed in collaboration with Accenture Strategy and launched on Wednesday at the European Commission, ranks 127 countries based on their ability to provide energy across three dimensions of the “energy triangle”. It finds that the highest performers, which are primarily smaller countries and advanced economies, can overcome constraints if supporting policies are in place.

Hurun Report and Wailian Group on Tuesday released the Hurun Immigrant Billionaires List 2017, a ranking of the immigrant billionaires from around the world. The Hurun team of researchers extensively went through the Hurun Global Rich List 2017, pulling out all first generation immigrants, those who reside today in a country different to where they were born and/or brought up. This is the first year of the list and is a sublist of the Hurun Global Rich List 2017 series, released on 7 March. Hoogewerf said, "We believe this to be the first serious attempt to track the immigration status of the world’s billionaires."

Switzerland’s economic growth projection for 2017 was downgraded as activity turned out disappointingly weak in the second half of last year.

In the Spring forecast, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) said it expected economic growth of 1.6% in 2017, down from the forecast of 1.8% it gave in December. The downward adjustment to resulted from a "sluggish close of 2016," SECO said.