SNB & CHF

Send us a Text Message. (https://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/915097/open_sms) Four years ago, our lives were upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. Countries locked down, millions became ill, millions died. And when the vaccine finally arrived, it was not fairly distributed. Rich countries bought too many, poor countries waited, with nothing.  “What we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic was collapse. Basically, a complete failure of international cooperation,” says...

Overview: The new week has begun off quietly. The dollar is in narrow ranges against the G10 currencies, +/- 0.15% as the North American market prepares to open. The Dollar Index is trading inside the narrow pre-weekend range. With softer US CPI, retail sales, and industrial production due this week, we have a downside bias for the greenback. Most emerging market currencies are firmer. A few Asian currencies, including the Chinese yuan and Philippine peso are among...

The money supply (M2) has bounced to March 2023 levels and has been rising almost every month since October last year. Furthermore, US government deficit spending has more than offset the decline in the Federal Reserve balance sheet. While the Fed’s balance sheet has shrunk by $1.5 trillion from its peak, the US government deficit remains above $1.5 trillion per year.The money supply (M2) in the United States has bounced above March 2023 levels, while deficit...

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....

Jeremy Bentham famously regarded natural rights as “nonsense on stilts” and taught that property rights are created by law and enforced by courts. Bentham’s view was that “before the laws, there was no property: take away the laws, all property ceases.” Lawyers in the Benthamite tradition accordingly set out to define the state-created nature of property rights and the boundaries of these rights as defined by the courts.The elusive nature of property has long...

Starting in 2020, things started to get strange in Africa for those who knew what to look for. Normally, coups in Africa are nothing to write about. But starting in 2020, we saw six countries flip into a pro-Russian direction in just three years. Individually, they were a curiosity. Taken together, that rate of turnover outpaced even the most optimistic neoconservative ambitions for pro–United States regime changes in the Middle East. As General Wesley Clark...

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....

The electoral victory of Javier Milei in Argentina was a pleasant surprise to libertarians internationally. For the first time ever, an open anarchocapitalist was elected president of a sovereign nation. Milei’s fame isn’t limited to libertarian circles, though. Right-wingers all over the world have praised him for his battle against corruption and economic ruin. He was even given a spot headlining for former president Donald Trump at the Conservative Political...

The Spring 2024 issue of the Independent Reviewfeatures a symposium on Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty, which was published some fifty years ago. One of the contributions, by the philosopher Matt Zwolinski, stands out from the others in that it is not favorable to Rothbard. To the contrary, Zwolinski argues that Rothbard’s case for liberty is unsound. In my view, he has failed to show this, but a number of his arguments are interesting, and in what follows, I’ll...

Created in 1960, the United Nations–recognized state of Somalia is by almost all accounts a failed state. Yet it continues to assert dominance over regions that are seeking further autonomy or independence. The UN has listed self-determination as a human right, but the global neighborhood rarely sees this human right respected or enforced by the UN. This is likely because of how slow-moving the UN can be and because the nations that make up the UN have conflicting...