SNB & CHF

We do not like Purchasing Power or Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER) as measurement for currencies. For us, the trade balance decides if a currency is overvalued. Only the trade balance can express productivity gains, while the REER assumes constant productivity in comparison to trade partners. Who has read Michael Pettis, knows that a rising trade surplus may also be caused by a higher savings rate while the trade partners decided to spend more. This is partially...

That’s how Neofeudal systems collapse: the tax donkeys and debt-serfs finally rebel and start demanding the $50 trillion river of capital take a new course. The Great American Middle Class has stood meekly by while the New Nobility stripmined $50 trillion from the middle and working classes. As this RAND report documents, $50 trillion has been siphoned from labor and the lower 90% of the workforce to the New Nobility and their technocrat lackeys who own the vast...

Within a day of the inauguration, the Biden administration issues a bevy of new executive orders designed to please a variety of the Democratic Party’s core special-interest groups. Among these was an executive order curtailing oil and gas leasing on federal and tribal lands. But a problem quickly presented itself: many tribes earn a significant amount of income through oil and gas drilling on their lands. These operations also provide jobs for tribal members. The...

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by 0.27% to 1.075 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, January 27(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: Risk appetites seem subdued even if GameStop’s surge draws attention. Asia Pacific equities mostly slipped lower, and profit-taking was seen in Hong Kong and Seoul, which are off to an incredibly strong start to the year. Small gains were reported in Tokyo, Beijing, and Taipei....

Britain is keen to maintain the City of London’s attractiveness as a global financial centre Keystone / Facundo Arrizabalaga Britain and Switzerland will press on with plans to strike a trade deal for their vast financial services industries, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday ahead of talks with his Swiss counterpart. The Treasury said the virtual discussions with Swiss Finance Minister Ueli Maurer would focus on the goal of “a...

Der Tribut, den das Coronavirus gefordert hat, war hoch. Aber eine neue Studie hat herausgefunden, dass die kollektive Reaktion auf das Virus letztendlich mehr Leben fordern könnte als das Virus selbst. In einer neuen Studie des National Bureau for Economic Research kommen Forscher der Harvard University, der Johns Hopkins University und der Duke University zu dem Schluss, dass die Maßnahmen zur Eindämmung der Virusausbreitung in den nächsten 15 Jahren zu 890.000...

Bruno Manser talking about the plight of the Penan in 1994 Keystone / Str The diaries of Bruno Manser, a Swiss environmental and human rights activist, have been donated to the Museum der Kulturen in Basel. The ethnologist became known far beyond the borders of Basel for his passionate but also perilous commitment to the Penan people of Borneo and the threatened tropical forests they called home. Manser went missing in 2000 and was officially declared dead in 2005....

[This is the fourth lecture from Mises’s “Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow“] If the supply of caviar were as plentiful as the supply of potatoes, the price of caviar—that is, the exchange ratio between caviar and money or caviar and other commodities—would change considerably. In that case, one could obtain caviar at a much smaller sacrifice than is required today. Likewise, if the quantity of money is increased, the purchasing power of the monetary...

Switzerland’s conscript army is fighting on a new front, providing logistical help in the battle with Covid-19. It’s responsible for the transportation and safe storage of all vaccines, which are kept in secret armed forces installations. Meanwhile, civil protection staff are also helping with contact tracing, virus screening and setting up reception centres in hospitals. swissinfo.ch is the international branch of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC). Its role is to report...

Funding continued to flow into start-ups last year, but was spread out more thinly than 2019. © Keystone / Christian Beutler More than CHF2 billion of venture capital flowed into young Swiss companies for the second year in a row, a sustained rate of funding that defied the economic destruction wreaked by the pandemic last year. Investors poured more money into fledging cleantech and biotech projects in 2020 at the expense of ICT and particularly fintech companies....