SNB & CHF

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...

While traveling recently, I was stuck in a terrible bout of traffic. Unbeknownst to me, West Virginia University’s fall graduation just ended, and I was caught in the middle of the seemingly endless stream of parents, relatives, and friends who were leaving the ceremony. To deal with this problem, the City of Morgantown closed down lanes and reserved them for exclusive use by graduation attendees. Though the city may have done a fine job handling traffic, this raises...

[This article is chapter 6 of Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities. Now available at Amazon and in the Mises Store.] During the early 1990s, as the world of the old Soviet Bloc was rapidly falling apart, the economist and historian Murray Rothbard saw it all for what it was: a trend of mass decentralization and secession unfolding before the world’s eyes. The old Warsaw Pact states of Poland, Hungary, and others won...

The year 2024 is poised to be a critical period for the global economy and it already appears to be fraught with economic and geopolitical challenges, casting a dark shadow over the global landscape. Signs of a looming economic downturn are becoming increasingly evident and the many challenges we faced over the past year will certainly remain with us for many months to come. Economic and monetary landscape  Central bankers in most advanced economies...