SNB & CHF

For over ten years researchers at the federal technology institute ETH Zurich have been developing robots that will one day explore the terrain or search for raw materials on the Moon or Mars. In this video, Hendrik Kolvenbach and Philip Arm show us what their “ANYmal” robot can already do and how their research is continuing. 00:12 - How ANYmal avoids obstacles 00:41 - Developing robots at the Robotic Systems Lab 01:47 - Training robots for lunar conditions 2:51 - ESA/ESRIC...

For those who have any exposure to the subject, Adam Smith is the father of modern economics. Few have heard of Richard Cantillon. Both wrote on the subject of wealth creation, Cantillon in Essay on the Nature of Trade in General and Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Of the two, Cantillon, who preceded Smith, may have had a firmer grasp on the dynamics of wealth creation. Cantillon is considered the father of entrepreneurship, whereas Adam Smith seemed to go out of his...

Overview:  Stronger than expected eurozone GDP strengthened the sense that a nascent recovery may be taking hold and has given the euro a bid in the European morning. The dollar, though, is enjoying a firmer tone against the other G10 currencies today. Australia's unexpected weakness in retail sales has weighed on the Antipodean currencies. The Aussie and Kiwi are off slightly more than 0.5% today. Japanese data were mixed (a recovery in industrial production but...

In the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East, new, autonomous weapons are being used. Our Inside Geneva podcast asks whether we’re losing the race to control them – and the artificial intelligence systems that run them.    “Autonomous weapons systems raise significant moral, ethical, and legal problems challenging human control over the use of force and handing over life-and-death decision-making to machines,” says Sai Bourothu, specialist in automated...

The ideal of individual liberty is perennially under attack not only from socialists, as one might logically expect, but also from conservatives who regard individualism as a form of selfishness. The ordinary meaning of selfishness is “caring only about what you want or need without any thought for the needs or wishes of other people,” and many conservatives see this as a major contributing factor in social decline. The conservative British journalist Nick Timothy...

You probably haven’t even noticed the Great Chocolate Crisis of 2024, but it is real and some of us are very concerned! The wholesale price of cocoa, which comes from the cocoa bean, is the main ingredient in chocolate and has skyrocketed in price!When the Spanish Conquistadors came across cocoa 500 years ago it was use by the Aztecs of Mexico in a drink combined with hot peppers—Talk about “hot coco!” It was called "the food of the gods." On the Thornton Necessity...

If you have been using the internet for longer than a couple of years, you might have noticed that it used to be much “freer.” What freer means in this context is that there was less censorship and less stringent rules regarding copyright violations on social media websites such as YouTube and Facebook (and consequently a wider array of content), search engines used to often show results from smaller websites, there were less “fact-checkers,” and there were (for...

Overview:  The FOMC meeting, the US employment report, and eurozone CPI were to be the highlights of the week, but the Japanese yen stole the march to start the week. The dollar soared to almost JPY160.20 before falling sharply to JPY154.55 and then rebounding to almost JPY156.00. Intervention has not been confirmed and BOJ data will not cover it until next month. On balance, it appears that most think it was algo-trading in thin markets given the Japanese holiday....

The thirty-eighth annual Mises University, where I have lectured for more than thirty of those years, will be held from July 28th to August 3rd at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Year after year, student attendees from all over the world tell us that it was the best week of their school year; that they learned more about the economic world in that week than in four years of college; that they would love to come back next summer; and that they will urge their...

Ludwig von Mises visited Argentina in June 1959 by invitation of Dr. Alberto Benegas Lynch. The lectures Mises delivered at the University of Buenos Aires are reproduced in the book Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow. As the title suggests, the economic knowledge transmitted by Mises was for both those days and for the future. Argentina in 1959 was in a recession, the Frondizi administration trying to cope with the terrible situation left by President...