I attended a panel discussion on private blockchains in banking at UBS in NYC last night. There were two overarching misconceptions that appeared to permeate the discussions:
Counterparties can be trusted, hence you can build reliable systems with trusted parties, and;
While Forex banks, traders, and other institutions are being blamed for market rigging, the Swiss National Bank can publish reports about its own market rigging, but instead of being a scandal, it's economic data. That's because the vast majority don't understand how the Forex markets work. It's not insulting - it's a fact. Currently there are hundreds of pending litigation cases against a plethora of Forex banks, traders, and other institutions - but none against a central bank.
By now it is common knowledge that when it comes to massive, taxpayer-backed hedge funds, few are quite as big as the Swiss National Bank, whose roughly $100 billion in equity holdings have been extensively profiled on these pages, including its woefully investments in Valeant and the spike in its buying of AAPL stock at its all time high.
Submitted by JP Koning via Moneyness blog,
Negative interests rates are the shiny new thing that everyone wants to talk about. I hate to ruin a good plot line, but they're actually kind of boring; just conventional monetary policy except in negative rate space. Same old tool, different sign.
In the spring of 2015 we showed something unexpected: one of the biggest buyers, and holders, of AAPL stock was none other than the already quite troubled - in the aftermath of its disastrous Swiss Franc peg which ended up costing it tens of billions in losses - largest hedge fund in Switzerland, its central bank, the Swiss National Bank.