SNB & CHF

Overview:  The market took US short-term rates and the dollar lower after the CPI data, which was largely in line with expectations. On the one hand, the odds of a quarter-point hike next month increased slightly (73.6% vs. 71.6%) to 5.25%, but it reinforced that sense that it is last hike and that the Fed will unwind this hike and more before the end of the year. The year-end implied policy rate fell by about six basis points to 4.33%. The dollar was sold against...

My grandson will graduate from a public school in May, and my daughter, his mom, asked me to write a senior letter for him. He’s been part of my life since he was born, and we’re all very proud of him. But what do I tell him about the world he’s about to enter? Right off he already knows his life itself has a claim on it by the State. If he fails to register for the draft, he could be sent to prison and fined $250,000. With enlistments falling off and the regime’s...

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) has shared how it intends to “future-proof” the domestic payment ecosystem, outlining its ambition to leverage technologies and processes including tokenization and distributed ledger technology (DLT) to establish an “efficient, reliable and secure ecosystem” that’s geared towards “the future of cashless payments in Switzerland,” SNB governing board member, Andréa Maechler, said during an event on March 30, 2023. The payment system is...

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“On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce tough new tailpipe emission standards designed to effectively force the auto industry to phase out the sale of gas-powered cars,” reports The Verge, with the provocative headline “The End Is Nigh for Gas-Powered Cars.” Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) is the newest religion, and we all know who the practitioners are. Electric vehicle (EV) owners sing “Hallelujah” when they pull...

For decades, providing students with the highest quality of education was a key objective in many countries because doing so would facilitate scientific progress and innovation, support social and economic development, and raise living standards. In recent years, however, the woke Left has garnered an increasingly prominent role in the education systems of many Western countries, and its adherents have been significantly altering many of the objectives and accepted...

Entrepreneurship is well-defined in economics, and well-recognized as the engine that drives economic growth. That means people enjoying greater well-being, including but not limited to material prosperity. But economic growth can be uneven. Some countries, some regions, and even some firms do not generate the same levels of economic growth as others. How do we understand this variability? We look for what holds entrepreneurship back. Knowledge Capsule...

News reports have been studded in recent weeks with talk of a “national divorce.” Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been the face of the national divorce movement, but she is hardly alone in her view that Republican and Democrat states need to go their separate ways. For example, a March poll of American adults found that 20 percent of respondents favored splitting the country up along red and blue lines. At the state level, too, talk of secession and...

Overview:  Today's highlight is the March US CPI, and while everyone is talking about it, it is unlikely to tell us anything we do not already know. Headline price pressures are easing but the core rate is sticky, and despite comments from the Chicago Fed president about the need for patience, the odds of a hike next month have crept up. Understanding the Fed's reaction function, it seems clear that for most officials, inflation is remains too high and the labor...

When I took my high school’s twentieth-century world history class, both the teacher and workbooks claimed repeatedly that World War II took us out of the Great Depression. Why would anyone question this? After all, unemployment went down. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics measured the unemployment rate from 1929 onward. In 1939 the unemployment rate stood at 17.2 percent. By 1942 it was at 4.7 percent, and by 1944 it was at 1.2 percent. Professor Friedrich Hayek...