SNB & CHF

Breaking down the different economic landing scenarios after the BLS threw us its best curveball. Did the payroll number change anything? Also, what Jay Powell and the FOMC might have thought about it. Eurodollar University's Money & Macro Conversation, with Steve Van Metre Twitter: https://twitter.com/JeffSnider_AIP https://www.eurodollar.university https://www.marketsinsiderpro.com https://www.PortfolioShield.net RealClearMarkets Essays: https://bit.ly/38tL5a7 THE EPISODES...

Keystone / Richard Jones China, Russia, Iran and other countries with dictatorships and strict regimes are increasingly blocking access to the free internet and are using the web to collect data. This guide explains how to avoid online censorship and use the internet safely and anonymously. A Swiss-American journalist mainly covering education, migration and youth issues – plus the occasional story on cheese, given her roots in Switzerland and Wisconsin....

True story: Many weekends during my studies in Changzhou, China, my friends and I would go out to have a drink only to realize that our favorite bar was not open that night. In fact, all of the city’s clubs would be closed. The reason? Police had decided to crack down on these nightclubs. These would mostly be drug-related crackdowns, but other reasons such as prostitution would make the list. This seemed to happen in cycles. Once the crackdown happened, things would...

Cheyenne, Wyoming, USA (February 2nd, 2023) – The Wyoming State Senate today voted 16-15, on a bipartisan basis, to pass a bill prompting the Wyoming state treasurer to hold gold and silver “specie” to protect the state – as well as establish a process to receive certain tax payments in specie. Introduced by Senator Bob Ide (R-Casper), SF 101 amends and further implements the Wyoming Legal Tender Act, a popular 2018 law that had removed all tax liability from gold...

Swiss journalists say they have less freedom to report on the financial sector than counterparts in other countries. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally Swiss journalists could in future receive leaked bank data without fear of criminal prosecution if a parliamentary motion is incorporated in banking secrecy legislation. On Thursday the government supported a proposal from the House of Representatives that the media would be exempt from prosecution if their reporting is...

The new year began amid optimism among investors. Equities and bonds rallied in January, clawing back some losses from last year. The dollar traded heavily, falling against most G10 and emerging market currencies. However, after the February 1 FOMC meeting, the dollar's sell-off exhausted the near-term selling pressure. An upside correction may be seen in the first part of February. We see this as a countertrend move and expect dollar weakness to re-emerge. The...

Those watching the gold price and price of silver will have noticed the sharp uptick following the Federal Reserve’s announcement, yesterday. This was despite the Fed doing exactly what everyone expected them to do. For now, the Federal Reserve is sticking to its relatively well-telegraphed plan but how long will it be until they need to move the goalposts in order to do so? . Gold and Silver prices rose sharply on the Fed’s statement on Wednesday. The change of...

The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on Wednesday raised the target policy interest rate (the federal funds rate) to 4.75 percent, an increase of 25 basis points. With this latest increase, the target has increased 4.5 percent since February 2022, although this latest increase of 25 basis points is the smallest increase since March of last year. Indeed, the FOMC has slowed its rate of increase over the past three months. After four 75 basis...

© Ngampol Thongsai | Dreamstime.com The 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), published on 31 January 2023, shows that most countries are failing to stop corruption. The CPI ranks 180 countries and territories around the world by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, scoring on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). The global average remains unchanged for over a decade at just 43 out of 100. More than two-thirds of countries score below...

Join the Mises Institute at the 2023 Libertarian Scholars Conference on Saturday, September 23. We’ll meet at the Grand Hyatt in Nashville, Tennessee. The first Libertarian Scholars Conference was held in New York City in 1972 under the aegis of the Center for Libertarian Studies. The conference was held annually (except for 1973) throughout the 1970s in New York or Princeton, New Jersey (1977, 1978), with the 8th and last “national” conference taking place at the...