SNB & CHF

[This article is Chapter 9 of Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities.] When we hear of political movements in favor of decentralization and secession, the word “nationalist” is often used to describe them. We have seen the word used in both the Scottish and Catalonian secession movements, and in the case of Brexit. Often the term is intended to be pejorative. When used pejoratively—as by the critics of Brexit—the...

It certainly isn’t common to find much agreement between the various authors here at the Mises Institute and our favorite metaphorical punching bag: Paul Krugman. But when it comes to the recently resurrected policy corpse of rent control, we have found a common cause. As Krugman noted back in 2000, The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and—among economists, anyway—one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the...

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...