Submitted by Ronan Manly of Bullionstar Blogs
Following on from last month in which BullionStar’s Koos Jansen broke the news that Venezuela had sent almost 36 tonnes of its gold reserves to Switzerland at the beginning of the year, “Venezuela Exported 36t Of Its Official Gold Reserves To Switzerland In January“, there have now been further interesting developments in this ongoing saga.
Two weeks ago, shortly before noting that Venezuela's CDS is now at the same level where Greece was 3 months before its default, we wrote that as a result of a recently implemented gold swap with Deutsche Bank, Venezuela was preparing to liquidate its remaining gold holdings (ostensibly temporarily, if only on paper) in order to pay down its upcoming debt maturities.
More than one-fifth of the world’s total GDP is in countries which have imposed negative interest rates, including Japan, the EU, Denmark, Switzerland and Sweden.
Negative interest rates are spreading worldwide.
And yet negative interest rates – supposed to help economies recover – haven’t prevented Japan and Europe’s economies from absolutely going down the drain.
Nor have they even stimulated spending. As ValueWalk points out:
Back in September 2012 we first presented "the world's biggest hedge fund nobody had ever heard of": a small, previously unknown company called Braeburn Capital which, however, managed more cash than even Ray Dalio's Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund.
How had the little firm operating out of a non-descript office building in Nevada achieved this claim to fame? By managing the cash hoard (now well over $200 billion) of the world's biggest and most valuable company: Apple.
Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
Switzerland is famous for being punctual.
The trains. The buses. The meticulously crafted, hand polished luxury watches.
The Swiss are so culturally punctual that they even tend to pay their taxes well in advance of the filing deadline.
So it was quite a shock to hear this morning that the Swiss canton of Zug is asking its citizens to delay paying their taxes for as long as possible.
Why? Negative interest rates.