SNB & CHF

Overview: The dollar continues to ride high. It is up 0.20%-0.50% today against the G10 currencies. Most pairs have extended last week's moves. The Dollar Index, which was near 100 in late September is approaching 106.00. Emerging market currencies are all weaker, as well. The dollar is being helped by higher US yields. After yesterday's holiday, the US 10-year yield is up five basis points to near 4.36%. The two-year yield also is five basis points higher to almost...

Europe was slowly, painfully recovering from WWII. Liberalism—which had seemingly won the day against fascism in the West—was seeking to revitalize itself. It had tried before the war—through the Walter Lippmann colloquium—to moderate itself back into relevance. Many of the figures from the colloquium were intent to try again, with lessons learned from the war. One attendee—Ludwig von Mises—had no intentions of moderating, and was even more convinced that such a road...

What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order....

Investor exuberance has rarely been so optimistic. In a recent post, we discussed investor expectations of returns over the next year, according to the Conference Board’s Sentiment Index. To wit: “Consumer confidence in higher stock prices in the next year remains at the highest since 2018, following the 2017 “Trump” tax cuts.“ (Note: this survey was completed before the Presidential Election.) We also discussed households’ allocations to equities, which,...

Just ignore the economists, says a recent article in The Atlantic. Well, what about listening to economists concerning the devastating effects of price controls? If we ignore economists, then it would be easy to ignore market interventionists’ uncontrollable and intoxicating need to impose price floors and ceilings in marketplaces and the effects of these controls on society at large. What economists know that The Atlantic author does not know is that there are...

Send us a text (https://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/915097/open_sms) This week Inside Geneva goes to New York. The United Nations (UN) General Assembly is hearing multiple reports of serious human rights violations. “I think it’s more difficult to get the human rights message [across] here in New York at the General Assembly. But hopefully we will be heard,” says Mariana Katzarova, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Russia. Ukraine, the Middle East...

Switzerland is a hub for research, high-skilled workers, and advanced manufacturing, especially in areas like biotech, robotics, and engineering. Keystone / Salvatore Di Nolfi Listen to the article Listening the article...

The images coming out of Latin America are hard to ignore. Tens of thousands of gang members in Bukele’s El Salvador lined up, shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting to be placed in prison, their rights suspended as a result of a crackdown on gang activity. Hundreds of government workers for AFIP—Argentina’s version of the IRS—standing in a multi-level gallery, papers drifting down to the bottom floor as they learn the agency has been shuttered. While the two presidents have...

Send us a text (https://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/910414/open_sms) Using a new type of instrument, two astrophysicists from the University of Bern hope to get a little closer to unravelling the mystery of the solar system's origins. They believe the key to this lies in the ice that can occur in a dust layer on comets. Please visit SWI swissinfo.ch for more information about this research and a video about ice on comets....

Assumptions that some economists are employing in their theories appear to be detached from the real world. For example, in order to explain the economic crisis in Japan, Paul Krugman employed a theory based on the assumptions that people are identical and live forever. Whilst admitting that these assumptions are not realistic, Krugman nonetheless is of the view that somehow his theory could be useful in offering solutions to the economic crisis in Japan. Thus,...