Diamond News Archives
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Celine Lau, the veteran manager of the Hong Kong Gem and Jewellery Fairs of June and September, responded to a letter sent earlier on August 21st by the Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC), the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC) and the Israel Diamond Institute (IDI), asking Lau to postpone the show.
In her letter, Lau stated that there are positive signs indicating that the situation is cooling down, and that the show will be held as planned.
"We have not received demands for cancellation as stated in your letter. Instead, what we have been getting are several calls from exhibitors inquiring about the possibility of securing better booth locations in case of any cancellations, and inquiries for participation. Rumors about the fair's alleged cancellation / postponement have in fact drawn more active inquiries on the show's exhibitor profile and contents.," Lau wrote.
She emphasized that with regard to the insurance coverage "for your members' merchandise," show management had obtained "confirmation from Malca-Amit and Brinks that there is NO change in the insurance policy in relation to the public incidents in Hong Kong."
Also, Lau wrote that "special transportation arrangements had bene made for visitors from China; visitors commuting between select hotels and fair venues; and visitors commuting between different destinations. As of today, many delegations have already confirmed their attendance, including groups from Poland, Vietnam, South America, Russia and China, to name a few."
"As of today, the travel alert level on Hong Kong remains comparable with the current alert level assigned to the UK, Europe, China and several other countries. It is very important for all of us to stay focused to make the best...
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What if I said I wanted to borrow $100 from you and pay you back $99 five years later? Would you do it?
And yet this is exactly what’s happening right now in the banking systems of Japan, Germany, France, and other European countries.
Negative interest rates — where the lender gets paid back less than they’ve loaned — now add up to 30%, (and counting), of the global tradable bond universe, according to JPMorgan (JPM). You may have seen for instance that Germany just sold the first negative yielding 30-year bond issue.[1][2]
In case you’re wondering, yes, this is crazy.
“It’s really unusual and really distorting the global financial system,” says Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities (DB). “I spend all my time talking about it.”
Negative rates are counterintuitive, unprecedented — and to my mind — mind-bendingly insane and downright scary. They are like a parallel universe where everything you’ve ever learned about finance and human behavior is turned upside down.
Worse, negative rates are being normalized by economists, bankers, and commentators.
Worst, I have a funny feeling this will end badly. Negative interest rates have all the hallmarks of serious trouble for the financial markets; an anomaly growing in scale which seemingly came out of nowhere that is under-recognized, poorly understood and dismissed as not consequential. (Flashing red lights here.)
In the U.S. we aren’t particularly aware of negative rates because they haven’t made their way to our shores ... perhaps yet.
Yes, the U.S. ten year Treasury yields 1.59%, not close to 0%, but negative rates seem to be creeping ever closer. For instance, negative interest rates haven’t come to U.S. corporate debt, but Euro-denominated bonds issued by...
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Gold set for worst week in nearly 5 months; Powell's speech in focus- Category: News Archives
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(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In the looking-glass world of negative-interest rates, the Swiss are in a special category. The Swiss National Bank went below zero ahead of everyone else back in 2014; now they’re poised to slash rates still further. Swiss banks like UBS have followed suit: They’ll soon start charging larger depositors to hold their cash.
The Swiss actually pioneered the practice back in the 1970s for the same reason: to keep their safe-haven currency from appreciating too much. But the lessons of that monetary experiment should give pause to anyone who believes that negative rates can halt capital inflows and appreciation in countries where the currency is fundamentally strong.
The postwar Swiss economy was largely driven by high-value exports like precision tools and watches. This worked well in the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates that defined much of the postwar era. But when U.S. President Richard Nixon suspended the conversion of dollars into gold in 1971, currencies gradually began to “float” against one another. The dollar went into a steep decline.
This unsettled currency markets. But one nation beckoned as a refuge from the growing storm: Switzerland. A combination of fiscal probity and monetary stability made the currency a safe place to wait out the crisis, and investors began buying up Swiss currency, driving up the value of the franc.
This was a disaster for Swiss exporters, and the Swiss government initially imposed reserve requirements on non-resident deposits. When that failed to stem the inflow of capital, they banned interest payments to non-residents. And when that didn’t work, they went negative, imposing a two percent penalty per quarter on anyone with the temerity to buy francs.
They backed off this radical move in 1973, but in the fall of that...
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Fed's Harker doesn't see need for another rate cut