Business

From Garfield Reynolds, Bloomberg FX, bonds and commodities macro commentator

Trading a Market That’s Both Beautiful and Damned

While the broader market for Swiss stocks has risen modestly this year, one 'entity' has outperformed its peers by such a staggering margin, it has left bamboozled market experts struggling for an explanation.

And that company is…the Swiss National Bank.

The price of a share in Swiss National Bank in August rose above 3,000 francs ($3,143) for the first time, more than double the level of a year ago, and up 50% since mid-July, as the Financial Times noted in a story about its performance.

British people have suddenly stopped buying cars and as BI's Jim Edwards notes, it's not clear why.

As the following chart from Barclays shows, both new- and used-car sales have collapsed...

While the slump in consumer confidence remains a major factor...

But as Edwards notes, a number of other factors are colliding simultaneously to hurt UK car sales:

While ECB President Mario Draghi faces his own German-bond-market constraints in his hubristic bond-buying-bonanza, cornering him to taper sooner than later; the Bank of Japan appears to have thrown every textbook out of the window and cranked their plunge-protection to '11', as Bloomberg reports, The Bank of Japan now holds 75% of the nation's ETFs.

A few weeks ago we highlighted an 'inconvenient fact' for the publicly traded electric car manufacturers and the environmentally-conscious Left, namely that, according to Morgan Stanley, electric cars generate more CO2 than they save.  As a stark reminder to our left-leaning political elites who created these companies with massive taxpayer funded subsidies in the United States, Morgan Stanley pointed out that while electric cars don't burn gasoline they do have to be charged using electricity generated by coal and other fossil fuels.