SNB & CHF

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...

American foreign policy is a museum of horrors in which Gaza 2023/2024 is the main exhibit.It is my conviction that Gaza is much more than just one more American foreign-policy failure, an event and topic to swill around like mouth wash, spit out and move on, once the usual “tsk, tsk” bromides have been disgorged.Uncle Sam’s usual deathly mixture of ignorance, cruelty and superiority has been exceeded with respect to Gaza. It is my belief that the United States’...

The former director general of CERN, Herwig Schopper, speaks with Pope John Paul II about the differences between religion and science. #switzerland #pope #religion #science #cern --- swissinfo.ch is the international branch of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC). Its role is to report on Switzerland and to provide a Swiss perspective on international events. For more articles, interviews and videos visit swissinfo.ch or subscribe to our YouTube channel: Website:...

The classical liberal defense of contractual freedom is derived from the principle of individual autonomy. Freedom of contract entails the right to enter into or exit from contracts at will. As Richard Epstein argues in his defense of the contract at will:The first way to argue for the contract at will is to insist upon the importance of freedom of contract as an end in itself. Freedom of contract is an aspect of individual liberty, every bit as much as freedom of...

When we talk about monetary policy, people do not understand the importance of interest rates reflecting the reality of inflation and risk. Interest rates are the price of risk and manipulating them down leads to bubbles that end in financial crises, while imposing too high rates can penalize the economy. Ideally, interest rates would flow freely and there would be no central bank to fix them.A price signal as important as interest rates or the amount of money would...

Jehisson Santacruz is a Colombian artist who's been living in exile in Switzerland since 2019. He fled his home country more than once because of death threats. As part of the Colombian diaspora, he was able to take part in the search for testimonies launched by the Truth Commission, that's working to rebuild the national identity, giving a voice to the civil war's victims. He's very passionate about the arts and traditions of Colombia and played the Colombian gaita, or kuisi, at the end of...