Tag Archives: Featured

Weekly update on SNB interventions: Sight deposits are debt for the central bank. An increase of sight deposits implies more debt and SNB interventions

The latest data show that the Swiss National Bank (SNB) has lost over half its owners' equity compared to December 2014. It is now less than 40 billion CHF, as compared to 86 billion in December 2014. We show the history for balance sheet and owners' equity.

Deutsche Bank's George Saravelos was one of the first to use the term "euro glut". He anticipated a massive capital outflow from Europe that countered the huge European current account surplus. The Euro glut also led to the end of the EUR/CHF peg. Reasons are missing investment opportunities in Europe despite the high savings rate.

George Dorgan shows that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a measurement in the local currency. Effectively, Swiss real GDP rose by 15% in Euro terms, but fell slightly in CHF. He also emphasizes that Switzerland needs a big rebalancing of its economy, away from exports towards consumption. The Swiss National Bank was right to remove the euro peg. The move towards consumption is only possible when the Swiss franc is stronger because consumers will profit on it.

We show the two phases or "two innings" of Swiss franc appreciation: The risk aversion game and the inflation game. With the weakening of emerging markets and the strengthening of the United States in 2013/2014, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) had won the first battle in the war against financial market, the "risk aversion game", the first inning in two-part match. Risk aversion is lower because the United States recovered with weaker oil prices. The "inflation game" started earlier than we...

In the new series George Dorgan suggests that the euro crisis is a temporary development but not a long-lasting crisis. In the first part he shows that Spain actually created a lot of jobs in last twenty five years.

After the strong revaluation of the Swiss franc in recent years, some economists, like the ones at the Swiss National Bank (SNB), claim that the franc is overvalued. Many use misleading Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) measures like the Big Mac index, the OECD index or the PPP based on consumer prices for computing fair values. The second big mistake is to use the wrong base year and to assume, for example, that in 1999 the CHF was correctly valued. The third mistake is to ignore massive Swiss...

George Dorgan explains why currencies of countries with trade surpluses must appreciate over the long-term. Thanks to these surpluses, inflation and costs of companies rise more slowly than in other countries. In Forex a mean reversion does not exist, but only an inflation-adjusted reversion to the mean: a real exchange rate mean reversion or in short the "real mean reversion."