SNB & CHF

The Census Bureau today released its advanced estimates for March trade. These include, among other accounts like imports and exports, preliminary results reported by retailers and wholesalers. That means, for our purposes, inventories. Oh my, was there ever more inventory. It was, apparently, widely expected that following an avalanche of goods building up over the previous five months the situation might calm down a touch. Analysts had figured wholesale...

Decentralization has long been at the forefront of the minds of Austro-libertarians. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, for instance, appeared on Austrian television this month sharing his dream of a Europe “which consists of 1,000 Liechtensteins.” Although principally based on economic reasoning, this policy agenda emerged at least in part out of a celebration of the historiography on the “European miracle,” which posits that the West grew rich because of the existence of...

The quickest way to discredit an intellectual opponent is to accuse that person of being a “conspiracy theorist.” But what happens when real conspiracies occur? Original Article: “Do Conspiracies Really Exist? Murray Rothbard Thought So” It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any “conspiracy theory of history;” for a search for “conspiracies” means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical...

It has been a rough week in most markets with both equities and bonds declining sharply. Tech stocks have been pummeled with many ‘big names’ plunging more than 50% (from their 52-week high). Some of the bigger names include Zoom Video -75%, PayPal -73%, Netflix -72%, Meta Platforms (Facebook), -53%. . The equity market decline is coupled with announced layoffs. Robinhood, the popular online trading platform, announced a 9% reduction in full-time staff this week for...

The Swiss National Bank is today publishing financial accounts data for Q4 2021. Data on household wealth are thus available for the whole of 2021; a commentary is provided below. This is followed by a detailed look at the development of the financial net worth of the Swiss economy’s institutional sectors since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Financial wealth of households increased significantly in 2021 Household financial assets increased by CHF 202 billion...

For the Swiss government, applying such a sweeping set of sanctions is a work in progress. Keystone / Peter Klaunzer There’s a well-worn Swiss bankers joke about the venality of a particular country. The actual country changes with the times but since this is April 2022, it starts like this: “Where is the capital of Russia?” You can guess the punchline. Two months into Vladimir Putin’s brutal war of aggression in Ukraine, however, what is remarkable is just how...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought to the forefront the NATO treaty to which the United States is a party. President Biden and the Pentagon have steadfastly maintained that a Russian attack on any NATO member automatically obligates the United States to go to war against Russia. That, of course, would necessarily mean the virtual certainly of all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States, a war that would, needless to say, end up destroying both...

We do not like Purchasing Power or Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER) as measurement for currencies. For us, the trade balance decides if a currency is overvalued. Only the trade balance can express productivity gains, while the REER assumes constant productivity in comparison to trade partners. Who has read Michael Pettis, knows that a rising trade surplus may also be caused by a higher savings rate while the trade partners decided to spend more. This is partially...

Days after Netflix reported bad earnings and an “unexpected” hit to their subscriber base, CNN announced that it had pulled the plug on its own brand-new streaming service, CNN+. Despite arguments to the contrary from the parent company, the CNN+ adventure turned out to be a costly mistake that attracted few subscribers and a paltry number of regular viewers. The project had already invested $300 million plus actor contracts they must reassign. They had plans to...

Last Friday, S&P Global (the merged successor to IHS Markit) reported that its PMI for German manufacturing fell to 54.1. It hadn’t been that low for more than a year and a half. Worse than that, the index for New Orders dropped below 50 for the first time since the middle of 2020. The excuses are plentiful, as there’s COVID, supply problems, Russia, a drop in demand. Wait, what was that last one? The S&P Global Flash Germany Manufacturing PMI fell to 54.1...