EU and Switzerland agree on free movement

(Photo: Patrick Nouhailler)

 

The EU approved a new Swiss law on Thursday (22 December) that will allow EU citizens to work in Switzerland, opening the way to solve a two-year crisis.

An EU-Swiss joint committee, where all 28 EU states are represented, said that the law passed last Friday in the Swiss parliament would limit the effect of a 2014 referendum to introduce immigration quotas into the Swiss constitution.

One of the consequences of the referendum would have been to limit the free movement of EU workers to Switzerland, a member of the passport-free Schengen area.

Game changer: Swiss banks ditch secrecy

Switzerland, the world’s largest offshore wealth center, worth an estimated $2.2 trillion in assets, has signed an agreement to share financial information with nearly 60 other countries, which could completely change the country’s financial landscape.

The country has made a giant leap towards banking transparency after it signed a convention with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) agreeing to exchange data with 60 member countries.

GOLD BANK RUN ACCELERATING…NOW THE SWISS WANT THEIR GOLD BACK- ALL 1040 TONS OF IT!

It should be interesting to see how the US will handle massive orders from multiple countries at once. There seems to be a momentum building among nations for wanting their gold out of the US and things might become even more interesting after all the chatter in recent months about gold reserves in the US being very low, non-existent, or gold bars filled with tungsten.

With last week’s announcement by the Bundesbank of the repatriation of 674 tons of German gold from Paris and NY over the next 7 years, we predicted that an avalanche of gold repatriation requests would soon be made to the BOE and the NYFed.

It appears that Switzerland may be next to the game, much to the dismay of the SNB.  The Swiss gold initiative, an initiative to Secure the Swiss National Bank’s Gold Reserves, launched in March 2012 by four members of the Swiss parliament, has grown to 90,000 supporters.

Once 100,000 supporters are achieved, the Swiss Parliament must take up the referendum.