SNB & CHF

Anyone following the news knows that after a bruising congressional hearing on antisemitism on elite college campuses knows that Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, recently lost their jobs. while the president from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is under fire. While the issue is being framed as these presidents permitting (and sometimes encouraging) antisemitism on campus, the real issue is...

A coin collection can tell a lot about this nation's monetary history, and especially what happened nearly 60 years ago after the government debased U.S. coinage. This history is not having a happy ending. Original Article: What an Old Coin Collection Tells Us about Money from the Past [embedded content] Tags:...

On New Year’s Eve, US Navy helicopters in the Red Sea engaged and sank three boats belonging to Yemen’s Houthis, killing ten. According to US Central Command, the boats were attacking a container ship and fired on the helicopters as they responded to the ship’s distress call. The encounter represents a significant escalation that risks forcing a whole new war on the American public and the Middle East. The Red Sea region has become one of the world’s most volatile...

Overview: The dollar is firm. Rates are mostly higher and equities lower. The moves scored in the holiday-thin markets are at end of last year are being unwound. This does not appear complete yet. Geopolitical tensions remain high but do not seem to be having a direct market influence as both gold and oil are trading lower. Among the G10 currencies, sterling has been the most resilient today but nearly flat. Within the emerging market complex, the Hungarian forint...

Many years ago, in “The Communist Road to Self-Enslavement” (included in After the Open Society, a collection of Karl Popper’s papers edited by Jeremy Shearmur), I discovered the following sentence: “Like myself, [Ludwig von Mises] appreciated that there was some common ground, and he knew that I had accepted his most fundamental theorems and that I greatly admired him for these.” As I respect both Popper and Mises as great thinkers, although thinkers who had...

Over the past two years archaeology students from the universities of Basel and Zurich and volunteer detectorists have unearthed thousands of Roman military artefacts littering a rolling meadow in southeast Switzerland. These include ancient swords, slingshot bullets, brooches, coins, fragments of shields and several thousand Roman hobnails. Based on recent finds, Swiss historians believe an important battle took place on the remote mountainside in the idyllic Julier Valley, south of...

Much onerous and harmful government regulation can be prevented by the application of well-known and well-understood principles of logic. I will use the recent regulations placed upon Americans in response to the so-called pandemic. I refer to the panoply of regulations that government enacted starting in 2020 as the covid control program. Application of proper logic would have eliminated the debate over the possible effectiveness of the regulations by allowing the...

Overview: The US dollar begins the new year on a firm note. It is recovering against nearly all the G10 and emerging market currencies today after depreciating in the holiday-thin markets over the past couple of weeks. Japanese markets are on holiday until Thursday. The yen and Swiss franc are the poorest performers among the G10 currencies. Among emerging market currencies, the Mexican peso, Hungarian forint, and South African rand are bucking the trend to post...

[Excerpted from Chapter 17 of Human Action.]   The services money renders are conditioned by the height of its purchasing power. Nobody wants to have in his cash holding a definite number of pieces of money or a definite weight of money; he wants to keep a cash holding of a definite amount of purchasing power. As the operation of the market tends to determine the final state of money's purchasing power at a height at which the supply of and the demand for money...

I had the good fortune of attending the Rothbard Graduate Seminar (RGS) twice in succession, during the summers of 2020 and 2021. By that time, I was already quite familiar with the ideas of the Austrian School thanks to the many podcasts and recorded Mises University lectures, among much more, the Mises Institute has made freely available online. However, I likely never would have realized my own understanding of Ludwig von Mises’s economic works was so deficient...