SNB & CHF

For lending, as in all things, necessity is the mother of invention. No matter the rate, lenders want to lend and borrowers want to borrow, with both sides tending to overdo it. The Wall Street Journal reports that the newest collateral thing is the AI chip. Wall Street heavyweight Blackstone led a $7.5 billion financing last week for CoreWeave, “a New Jersey–based startup that owns artificial-intelligence chips and associated computing gear in data centers.”The...

How ironic that the son of a Democrat president of the United States is having to pay the price for living in a paternalistic state that his own father ardently supports. Hunter Biden is currently on trial in a U.S. District Court for federal gun-control violations. Waiting in the wings is another federal prosecution for income-tax violations. It’s worth noting that what Biden did would never be considered offenses in a genuinely free society. In the...

What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order....

When it comes to political battles and controversies there is, unfortunately, a deeply-seated human tendency to emotionally attach one’s self to political leaders and candidates, rather than to principles or policies. This tendency is especially foundational to modern democratic politics in which voters are encouraged to embrace candidates on an emotional level. Once this occurs, the specifics of a candidate’s positions and principles become secondary to the...

The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has finally secured an electoral mandate on June 4, 2024. However, the stock market has not reacted favorably to this mandate because the BJP was unable to surpass the magical number of 272 seats in the Lok Sabha. Both the SENSEX and NIFTY corrected themselves by approximately 6%. The market is anxious about policy continuity since the BJP does not have a clear majority in the Lok Sabha and will have to govern in...

In recent days, we have had brought home to us what “show trials” are like. They are not confined to Soviet Russia and its satellite countries during the Cold War but are a very present reality to us in America today. Political opponents of Donald Trump charged him with felonies for acts that were entirely legal. The judge in the case was a political opponent of Trump and worked artfully to prevent the trial jury from hearing testimony that would have exposed the...

Overview: The dollar is little changed against the major currencies ahead of the US jobs report. It has been trading heavier than we expected given that two more G10 central banks cut interest rates ahead of the Federal Reserve. Next week is its meeting and the market-sensitive CPI. US rates have fallen, and as we note below, the US two-year premium over Germany is at its lowest in nearly three months. The euro is about 0.4% higher on the week ahead of the US...

Originally published by Law&Liberty. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been a source of controversy since its creation. Critics of the agency have long argued that its independent status is unconstitutional. In a recent decision, however, the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding scheme, even though it circumvents the normal Congressional appropriation process by “allowing the Bureau to draw money from the earnings...

What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order....

What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order....