The Swiss National Bank (SNB) is very opaque by international standards. That has to change, says Yvan Lengwiler, professor of economics at the University of Basel. He explains his proposals in the latest Geldcast update. “There is no right to secrecy,” says Yvan Lengwiler – not even at the Swiss National Bank. He has joined forces with Stefan Gerlach of the EFG Bank and Charles Wyplosz, a professor at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, to form the “SNB...
Read More »Warum man „Inflation“ nicht messen kann
Über „die Inflation” wird viel Irreführendes geredet. Von Politikern, Zeitkommentatoren und selbst von manchen Ökonomen. Schon die am meisten verbreitete Definition ist falsch. So heißt es, „Inflation” sei ein anhaltender Anstieg der Preise. Weiterhin wird behauptet, dieser Anstieg ließe sich messen und demnach ergebe sich das „Preisniveau” und die „Inflationsrate”. Preise Der Grundirrtum des Ansatzes zur Messung der Preisinflation besteht darin, zu glauben,...
Read More »Crash Is King
This may be one of many revaluations of capital vis a vis labor and resources and core vis a vis periphery. You’ve heard the expression “cash is king.” Very true. But it’s equally true that “crash is king:” when speculative excesses collapse under their own extremes, the crash crushes all other narratives and becomes the dominant dynamic. Everything that the mainstream uses to predict “value,” market action and “the future” is tossed out the window. Price-earnings,...
Read More »War in Ukraine – Week 8
Day 56 April 20 4-year old Alisa is begging to be evacuated from under siege Mariupol. So are thousands of others after about 50 days underground. But russia won’t allow it. They are holding these people hostage, watching them die slowly and painfully one by one. Source: Nataliya Melnyk on Facebook ********************************************************* Day 55 A big thank you from my little shelter van Goghs to everyone who helps us keep them distracted...
Read More »Taking A Deep Dive Into Forex & World Currencies With Marc Chandler — Interview with DiMartino Booth
Taking A Deep Dive Into Forex & World Currencies With Marc Chandler — Down the Middle Interview with Danielle DiMartino Booth Marc Chandler is a foreign exchange market analyst, writer, speaker, and professor. On August 19, 2009, Bloomberg L.P. published Chandler's first book, Making Sense of the Dollar. Marc has been covering the global capital markets for more than 30 years, including stints as the global head of currency strategy for both HSBC and Brown Brothers Harriman....
Read More »China’s Covid Sends Commodities Lower and helps the Dollar Extend Gains
Overview: Fears that the Chinese lockdowns to fight Covid, which have extended for four weeks in Shanghai, are not working, and may be extended to Beijing has whacked equity markets, arrested the increase in bond yields, and lifted the dollar. Commodity prices are broadly lower amid concerns over demand. China’s CSI 300 fell 5% today and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was off more than 3.5%. Most of the major markets in Asia Pacific were off more than 1%. Europe’s Stoxx 600...
Read More »Vietnam Should Have Been the End of US Foreign Intervention. It Wasn’t, and the World Is Worse Off
In 1975, after nearly a decade of outright conflict, the United States government abandoned its doomed escapade in Vietnam. It left a devastated country and over a million corpses in its wake. The corrupt South Vietnamese regime, already teetering on utter collapse, completely dissolved without American support. And the Communist forces of North Vietnam eagerly descended on Saigon, impatient to implement their antimarket and antiproperty policies. What followed was a...
Read More »CNY’s Drop Wasn’t ‘Devaluation’ in ’15 nor ’18, and It Isn’t ‘Devaluation’ Now
For one thing, that whole Bretton Woods 3 thing is really off to an interesting start. And by interesting, I mean predictably backward. According to its loud and leading proponent, China’s yuan was supposed to be ascending while the dollar sank, its first step toward what many still claim will end up in some biblical-like abyss. Instead, CNY is doing the plummeting and at a speed reminiscent of August 2015. That month did not, obviously, lead to a vast rearrangement...
Read More »The (less) Dollars Behind Xi’s Shanghai of Shanghai
What everyone is saying, because it’s convenient, is that China’s zero-COVID policies are going to harm the economy. No. Economic harm of the past is the reason for the zero-COVID policies. As I showed yesterday, the cracking down didn’t just show up around 2020, begun right out in the open years beforehand, born from the scattering ashes of globally synchronized growth. Xi Jinping saw how a very different post-2008 global economy without any recovery was going to...
Read More »It’s Time for TINA to Retire
To listen to the audio version of this article click here. In the world of trends, history repeats more than it rhymes. Things which were considered “in” decades ago, reemerge as cool again decades later. From mom jeans to vinyl records and even Marxist ideology. The spotlight of today turns to things—both good and bad—once forgotten. Inflation is the latest trend to reemerge. But this isn’t the kind and considerate inflation which hummed quietly in the background...
Read More »