SNB & CHF

In the recent criminal prosecutions of Donald Trump and Hunter Biden, prosecutors and others emphasized that “no one is above the law.”Really? No one?How about retired Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, Jr.? When he was serving as the Director of National Intelligence, he got caught lying under oath to Congress after he falsely denied that “the NSA was collecting data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”Imagine Clapper’s surprise when Edward Snowden revealed...

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....

On May 14, Alexey Pertsev, one of the lead developers of Tornado Cash (TC), was found guilty of money laundering by a Dutch court and sentenced to sixty-four months in prison. TC is a privacy-preserving protocol developed for the Ethereum blockchain: it allows users to deposit funds in a TC pool and withdraw them to a different address, thus making it impossible for external observers to track financial activity. TC is completely noncustodial, meaning that users are...

Overview: The dollar fell alongside US rates yesterday after the softer than expected CPI. The move on both rates and the dollar were pared after the FOMC meeting which held rates steady as widely expected, but the median dot now anticipated one cut this year rather than three. The dollar has recovered more ground today and is trading with a slightly firmer bias G10 currencies. However, trading is quiet and mostly narrow ranges have dominated. North American...

In his book, Democracy: The God That Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe talks about the neoconservative movement in the U.S. emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the left became increasingly involved with Black Power, affirmative action, pro-Arabism, and the counterculture of those times. In opposition to all this,many traditional left-wing (frequently former Trotskyite) intellectuals and cold war “liberals,” led by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, broke...

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....

USD/CHF gained ground as FOMC left its benchmark lending rate in the range of 5.25%–5.50% on Wednesday. Powell stated, “We don’t see ourselves as having the confidence that would warrant policy loosening at this time.” Swiss Franc may see limited downside as SNB is unlikely to implement a rate cut in June. USD/CHF retraces its losses from the previous session after the hawkish hold from the US Federal Reserve (Fed). The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) left its...

When people talk about “the market” they are usually referring the big indexes – the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ. For more casual observers, “the market” is the Dow which is a lousy index for a lot of reasons but has the advantage of history. But are any those really representative of how “the market” is doing? Not really. All markets – stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities – provide us with valuable information about the economy. The stock market generally reflects...

Gresham’s law states that bad money drives out good money. Gresham’s law goes something like this: overvalued money that has less actual value circulates in a market economy, and the undervalued money with the same face value but whose metal has more value is hoarded and thus goes away. People move the good money out of an economy for future use in better markets, while the bad money is circulated and takes over as a common economic good. What does Gresham’s law have...

Overview: Position adjustments ahead of today's US CPI and FOMC meeting are giving the dollar a modestly heavier tone today. Each of these events are typically a source of volatility in their own right and together they promise an eventful North American session. The yen is the only exception among the G10 currencies, but even there, the dollar is holding below yesterday's highs. Even sterling's relative resilience this week was unmarred by the flat April GDP. Led...