SNB & CHF

The thirty-year mortgage, of all things, came under attack in a piece by Ben Casselman in the New York Times. The three-decade fixed rate loan is, of course, a creation of the government and adds constant fuel to the US housing market. The title of Casselman’s piece calls the most popular debt instrument for home purchases “weird,” “cushy,” and “old.” He blames low interest rate thirty-year fixed loans for the broken housing market. Casselman points out that nearly...

Many countries in Africa have few practicing forensic pathologists. A medical institute in Switzerland is working to change this. The University Centre of Legal Medicine (CURML), run by the university hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne, set up an annual training programme for African professionals, like judges, lawyers, police officers and doctors, to improve their forensic skills. Their tuition fees are covered by the canton of Geneva and the Swiss government. --- swissinfo.ch is the...

[From Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow (1979), Lecture 2, "Socialism" (1958)] I am here in Buenos Aires as a guest of the Centro de Difusión Economía Libre.1 What is economía libre? What does this system of economic freedom mean? The answer is simple: it is the market economy, it is the system in which the cooperation of individuals in the social division of labor is achieved by the market. This market is not a place; it is a process, it is the way in...

Critics of college legacy admissions claim that the practice is racist and admits undeserving students. The longer-term results of such admissions show why colleges continue to employ them. Original Article: The Legacy of Legacy Admissions Is Not What the Critics Claim [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter

One of the political trends of the past few years has been an expanding disconnect between political unity rhetoric and the increasing disharmony politicians’ proposals create. The root of this beltway cognitive dissonance is the rapid increase in government power. Unity rhetoric helps mobilize candidates’ political bases and can sway some independents, helping win elections. However, their postelection expansion of government power into areas where people have...

Overview: Outside of the Australian dollar, which has fallen by around 0.6% following the RBA meeting and the softer final PMI, which may have dragged the New Zealand dollar a lower by around 0.25%, the other G10 currencies trading little changed ahead of the start of the North American session. The eurozone and UK final PMIs were revised higher. Central European currencies lead the emerging market currencies. China reported better than expected Caixin PMI and...

Part I of II, by Claudio Grass, Switzerland It is a worn-out cliché that many (if not most) political zealots meet their downfall because of their arrogance. “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall,” the proverb goes, and it does prove true more often than not. The specific kind of pride, or haughty spirit, or plain hubris in this case, has to do with the certainty that some people have (one can’t imagine how and why it could...

Is cryptocurrency a scam or is it a legitimate alternative to state-corrupted money? Political elites want to eliminate it altogether, but that alone should tell us we need to better understand this alternative money source. Original Article: Cryptocurrency: Integrity Destroyer or Policy Scapegoat? [embedded content]...

Paul Krugman can’t figure out why everybody is so bummed about the economy. From his perspective, we should all be jumping for joy, praising Joe Biden, and publicly signing fifty-year commitments to vote Democrat. Official statistics show that “unemployment is still near a 50-year low, yet inflation has been falling fast.” But the ignorant masses simply won’t get with the picture. Krugman admits “surveys of consumer sentiment and political polls continue to show that...

Philip Goff wants to solve the why of the universe, but his answers are not always logically coherent, as David Gordon explains. Original Article: The Taxman Cometh [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter