SNB & CHF

Should political reform be the result of a much-discussed comprehensive plan? Or should it come about through decentralized decision-making that deals with the situations at hand? Original Article: "Comprehensive Reform versus Piecemeal Reform" [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter

Americans are in a time of rising labor unrest and activism, including multiple unionization campaigns, regulatory and legal changes to make it easier for unionization efforts to succeed, the “Fight for $15” minimum wage agitation, and the Hollywood writer’s strike. However, such discussions and campaigns seldom approach the issues involved from a moral perspective, beyond the implicit presumption that trying to force others to give you a raise must be moral. That is...

Overview: Concerned about the political wrangling over servicing US debt, Fitch put the US on negative credit watch. Besides chin wagging and finger pointing, it has had little perceptible impact. The dollar is mostly higher, reaching new highs for the year against the Japanese yen, Chinese yuan, and the Antipodean currencies. The euro and sterling met retracement objective we have targeted (~$1.0735 and $1.2435, respectively). The greenback is also firmer against...

In perhaps one of the most unexpected and sudden shifts in consumer demand in recent years, sales of Bud Light have now fallen sizably for six weeks in a row, with no end in sight. The New York Post reported on Monday that "Sales of the US’s No. 1 beer were down 24.6% for the week ended May 13 compared to a year ago — slightly worse than the 23.6% dip they suffered a week earlier."  But it's not just Bud Light. Sentiment has turned against Bud Light parent...

Tucker Carlson has rankled the ruling elites for many years. But was his interview with Robert Kennedy Jr. a bridge too far? Original Article: "Did Tucker's Last Major Guest Lead to His Firing?" [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter

George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier is a book for which I kept hearing recommendations. I was told that it contained biting criticisms of socialism and was a valuable source of antiauthoritarian thought. What I found, instead, was a snobbish text that ineffectually denounces snobbery, an erudite-sounding text that lacks any philosophical or economic depth, and a persistent veil of ignorance over and presumption in favor of state intervention for any of the...

By any conventional measures of finance, the Federal Reserve has negative equity. In the long run, cooking the books only puts off the day of reckoning. Original Article: "The Fed Is Overindebted, Isn’t It?" [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter

On May 12, 2023, Elon Musk announced that Linda Yaccarino, the now former chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, would become the new CEO of Twitter. Musk’s appointment of Yaccarino followed an advertiser exodus that caused Twitter’s ad revenue to plummet by more than 60 percent from October 2022 through January 25, 2022, from around $127 million to just over $48 million. According to Pathmatics, by Sensor Tower, more than half of Twitter’s...

Overview: Equities in the Asia Pacific region and Europe are being led lower by the sell-off in the US yesterday. All the large Asia Pacific markets fell with Hong Kong and mainland shares setting the pace. Europe's Stoxx 600 is off nearly 1.5%, which would be the largest loss in two months. Consumer discretionary, financials and real estate sectors are off nearly 2%. US equity futures have a softer bias. European 10-year yields are mostly 2-3 bp lower, but the UK...

While Japan made some technological transfers to these places, prosperity came to them later, with the advent of free-market economies. Original Article: "Was Japanese Colonialism the Engine of Later Prosperity for Korea and Taiwan? Probably Not" [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter