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Sweden faces some time out in the cold Norway, Denmark and Finland are reportedly considering keeping their borders with Sweden closed, even as and when they open them to others, because of the higher prevalence of Covid-19 infections there following its …
22nd May 2020
Yet another iteration of the Norwegian Budget The publication of a revised 2020 budget by the Norwegian government on Tuesday raised a couple of points worth noting. First, the government’s forecast of a 4% fall in mainland GDP this year is on the …
15th May 2020
Limited solace from Sweden’s light-touch lockdown This week provided mixed messages on the health of the Swedish economy. On a positive note, there were welcome signs that the country has reaped some benefit from its light-touch lockdown – at least from a …
7th May 2020
KOF Barometer is feeling under the weather The unprecedented scale of the Covid-related economic carnage has seen previously reliable relationships between business surveys and output break down in many countries, and Switzerland is no exception. While …
1st May 2020
Norwegian economy sideswiped by Covid-19 Statistics Norway took the award for this week’s most irrelevant data release, with the unemployment rate from way back in February, but it more than made amends with the ahead-of-schedule publication of its Q1 GDP …
24th April 2020
Switzerland announces its exit plan In the week when Danish children under 11 returned to school, Switzerland announced yesterday that it too will start to ease its containment measures from 27 th April. Its three-phase plan foresees allowing small …
17th April 2020
Norwegian economic activity falls off a fjord The release of February GDP data from Norway on Tuesday showed that the mainland economy was far from a picture of health even before the ramp-up in containment measures in mid-March. Measured in 3m/3m terms, …
9th April 2020
Sweden’s services PMI is even worse than it seems In ordinary times, the 9.5-pt fall in Sweden’s services PMI in March, from 56.4 to an 76-month low of 46.9, would be enough to make you choke on your filmjölk . After all, the monthly decline was the …
3rd April 2020
Better late than never While it’s been a relatively quiet week on the monetary policy front by recent standards, there is still plenty worth recapping here. The regular weekly data-dump from the SNB early on Monday morning indicated that the Bank made its …
27th March 2020
Norges Bank opens door to further rate cuts Harold Wilson famously said that a week is a long time in politics, and this week demonstrated that the same can be true for central banks. While policymakers everywhere have not exactly been sitting on their …
20th March 2020
Norges Bank and Riksbank are ruling nothing out After a bruising week for equities and the Norwegian krone, it is half-encouraging that the Nordic authorities are all singing off the same hymn sheet. Nonetheless, policymakers will not be able to prevent …
13th March 2020
Pressure building on the SNB to cut rates While the 0.2% increase in Swiss GDP in Q4 2019 was in line with our forecast, attention has understandably moved on to the economic impact of the coronavirus and the coming policy response. There is little in the …
6th March 2020
Covid-19 dominates proceedings in Switzerland The geographic proximity of Switzerland to Italy has understandably raised fears about the potential spread of the coronavirus. With the number of confirmed cases in Switzerland up to 15 at the time of …
28th February 2020
Policymakers agree to disagree Having drawn criticism for its optimistic projections for interest rates in the past, the Riksbank is keen to show that it means business with its forecast to leave the repo rate unchanged over the coming years. However, …
21st February 2020
Riksbank will need to ease policy soon It was no surprise that the Riksbank left its repo rate on hold at zero percent this week or that it continued to forecast rates staying there until 2022. However, we think that underlying growth and inflation will …
14th February 2020
Activity in Norway set to regain pace this year The release of Q4 GDP data from Norway this morning confirmed that the mainland economy lost momentum at the end of last year. The slowdown in quarterly growth, from a downwardly-revised 0.6% in Q3 to 0.2% …
7th February 2020
Manufacturing appears to have passed the worst January’s surge in the Swiss KOF was the most eye-catching data release of the week. While we suspect that the scale of the improvement from December may have been a bit of a rogue reading, the fact that the …
31st January 2020
The show must go on If it weren’t for constitutional limits on holding snap elections, Norway would be heading to the polls this year after a rift over policy led the far-right Progress Party (PP) to pull out of the current four-party coalition government …
24th January 2020
No easy choices for Swiss policymakers The re-inclusion of Switzerland on the US Treasury’s Monitoring List of potential currency manipulators this week did not come entirely out of the blue. Having only been taken off the list in May 2019, we predicted …
17th January 2020
SNB back in the FX market If staff at the SNB had hoped to ease themselves back in gently after the Christmas break, they will have been disappointed. Data released on Monday indicate that the Bank intervened to weaken the franc last week for the first …
10th January 2020
Swiss economy still not out of the woods The latest surveys from Switzerland support our view that the economy is likely to continue growing at a fairly sluggish pace over the first half of this year. Admittedly, data published in late December showed the …
3rd January 2020
A decade in the spotlight Despite accounting for just 1.5% of global GDP between them (at PPP exchange rates), Switzerland and the Nordic economies have found themselves at the frontier of economic policymaking over the past decade – particularly when it …
20th December 2019
Beware of the survey! The Norwegian krone barely moved after inflation data for November were released early on Tuesday morning. However, the currency plunged just two hours later after the latest quarterly Regional Network Survey indicated that economic …
13th December 2019
No sign of green shoots in Swedish industry Another week, and yet more data from Sweden that call into question the wisdom of the Riksbank’s probable rate hike later this month. As in Germany, conditions in the industrial sector are going from bad to …
6th December 2019
Setting the stage for a December repo rate hike The pick-up in GDP growth in Sweden in Q3 (see here ) was much stronger than the small contraction that we had pencilled in, and was at odds with the raft of weak survey data that we had put emphasis on. It …
29th November 2019
Big pharma, big statistical distortions Perhaps the most eye-catching data release of the week was on Thursday when the Federal Statistical Office in Switzerland reported that Swiss industrial production jumped by 8% in Q3 from the same period a year ago. …
22nd November 2019
Views from the ground in Stockholm One of the issues that came up a lot in our client meetings in Stockholm this week (see here ) was the appropriate mix between fiscal and monetary policy in Sweden. In a speech on Wednesday, Martin Flodén added to the …
15th November 2019
Musical chairs at the Riksbank The announcement this morning by the Riksbank that Anna Breman will fill the vacant seat on the Executive Board ends the period of uncertainty since the news of Kerstin af Jochnick’s departure was made public in July. It was …
8th November 2019
Deflation rears its head again in Switzerland… Perhaps fittingly in the week of Halloween, data released this morning showed that deflation came back to haunt the SNB in October. (See here .) With the KOF Economic Barometer confirming that the economy …
1st November 2019
Riksbank gunning for zero at all costs As expected, the Norges Bank and the Riksbank both left their policy interest rates on hold on Thursday, at 1.50% and -0.25% respectively. (See here .) Nonetheless, the strong hint by the Riksbank that it will “most …
25th October 2019
Statistics Sweden sound a health warning The news that the Swedish unemployment (UP) rate was unchanged at its highest level since June 2015 in September (7.4%) initially caused the krona to fall against the euro on Thursday morning. However, the currency …
18th October 2019
Swedish activity data flatter to deceive On the face of it, the stronger than expected activity data from Sweden for August released this week lend support to the Riksbank’s forecast that it will hike rates over the next six months or so. Production in …
11th October 2019
What’s Swedish for ‘disastrous’? The plunge in Sweden’s manufacturing PMI in September, from 51.8 to just 46.3, was bad enough on its own. (See here .) But taken together with the sharp fall in the services PMI (data released yesterday), the overall …
4th October 2019
No signs of green shoots in the Swedish economy Another week, and yet more evidence that the Swedish economy is stuck in first gear. The Economic Tendency Indicator fell for the fifth month in a row in September (data released on Thursday), driven by a …
27th September 2019
Lots of chatter from the Riksbank If a week is a long time in politics, two weeks is an eternity in Swedish economics! The clear deterioration in the economic data since the September policy meeting just a couple of weeks ago – not least the further rise …
20th September 2019
Over to you, SNB! The recent pick-up in investor risk appetite has given the SNB a little breathing space ahead of its policy meeting next Thursday. Weekly data indicate that the Bank paused its FX interventions to weaken the franc at the end of August …
13th September 2019
The Riksbank is in a group of one It was no surprise to see the Riksbank present substantial downward revisions to the back-end of its forecast for the repo rate at its policy meeting on Thursday. However, the fact that the Bank stuck to its forecast of a …
6th September 2019
Dire Swedish data run goes On and On and On The fourth consecutive fall in the Swedish Economic Tendency Indicator continued the recent run of poor data releases. The indicator fell in August to its lowest level since June 2013 and the broad-based …
30th August 2019
NOK/EUR to fall to record low Markets are more “hawkish” than we are on rates in Norway – they expect rates to be raised by roughly 50bp by the end of this year while we expect the Bank to leave them unchanged. Meanwhile, investors appear to have priced …
23rd August 2019
SNB FX interventions are gathering pace Spare a thought for the poor FX team at the SNB: while much of Europe is away on holiday, data released on Monday showed that they recently had their busiest week of interventions since April 2017. It’s worth noting …
16th August 2019
No end in sight to the downturn in Sweden The latest data releases for June from Sweden show that the flash estimate of a contraction in the economy in Q2 was no rogue reading. We learned on Tuesday morning that private sector production fell for the …
9th August 2019
Swedish economy to flirt with recession… The 0.1% q/q fall in Swedish GDP in Q2 is unlikely to be the final word on the matter given that the data are almost certain to be revised in September. (See here .) Nonetheless, the release adds to signs that the …
2nd August 2019
Dovish ECB to make life difficult for the SNB Having seen the Swiss franc post multiple fresh two-year highs against the euro early in the week, the SNB will have welcomed the drop in the currency after the ECB meeting on Thursday. The fall was mirrored …
26th July 2019
Franc leaves exporters with a mountain to climb The widening in Switzerland’s trade surplus in June (data released on Thursday) was driven in large part by weakness in imports and masked a continued slowdown in export growth. The rise in the value of the …
19th July 2019
The Riksbank has fallen well behind the curve The minutes of the Riksbank’s July monetary policy meeting, released this morning, offered little in the way of surprises. As was the case in the February meeting, the decision to hold the repo rate unchanged …
12th July 2019
Swiss market shrugs off loss of ‘equivalence’ The Swiss stock market took the expiration of the ‘equivalence’ regime with the EU in its stride this week, mirroring the buoyant performance of other equity markets. The Swiss Market Index (SMI) jumped by …
5th July 2019
Swiss-EU stock market equivalence is no more The spat between the Swiss government and the EU came to a head this week after it became clear that the EC will follow through on its threat to let the current ‘equivalence’ regime for share trading lapse from …
28th June 2019