Tag Archives: Featured

The Wrong Approach This question is no longer moot. As the world moves inexorably towards the use of metallic money, interest on gold and silver will return with it. This raises an important question. Which interest rate will be higher? It’s instructive to explore a wrong, but popular, view. I call it the purchasing power paradigm. In this view, the value of money — its purchasing power —is 1/P (where P is the price...

Swiss Franc EUR/CHF - Euro Swiss Franc, May 12(see more posts on EUR/CHF, ) - Click to enlarge GBP/CHF The pound to Swiss Franc rate has broken 1.30 this week as sterling has risen and investors confidence over the outlook for politics in the Eurozone increased. The election of Emmanuel Macron has removed the uncertainty over the increase in Europe of right-wing parties which could have threatened the...

With Monday’s financial media blasting reports about the VIX collapse to levels not seen in 24 years, going all the way back to 1993, it is worth remembering that the near record low volatility collapse of 1993 did not end well either for stocks, or for bonds, with the great 1994 bond tantrum.  Reminding us of that, and of broader implications for the cross-asset space, is SocGen’s Kit Juckes with his overnight note,...

Asbestos being removed from a Zurich tower block in 2003 (Keystone) Despite a lack of progress to limit products such as asbestos and the herbicide paraquat, Switzerland is largely pleased with the results of a summit on chemicals and hazardous waste held in Geneva. “We obtained much more than we expected,” Franz Perrez, the head of international affairs at the Federal Environment Office, told the Swiss News Agency on...

The Guessers Convocation On Wednesday the socialist central planning agency that has bedeviled the market economy for more than a century held one of its regular meetings.  Thereafter it informed us about its reading of the bird entrails via statement (one could call this a verbose form of groping in the dark). A number of people have wondered why the Fed seems so uncommonly eager all of a sudden to keep hiking rates...

I don’t think Milton Friedman would have made much of chess player. For all I know he might have been a grand master or something close to that rank, but as much as his work is admirable it invites too the whole range of opposite emotion. He was the champion libertarian of the free market who rescued economics from the ravages of New Deal socialism, but in doing so he simply created the avenue for where Economics of...

The following is an excerpt from David Enrich’s nonfiction financial and legal thriller The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History.  (Read part of the prologue here; another excerpt can be found here) This excerpt takes place shortly after the accused mastermind of the Libor scandal, Tom Hayes, is fired from his job at...

 Two weeks ago Bank of America caused a stir when it calculated that central banks (mostly the ECB & BoJ) have bought $1 trillion of financial assets just in the first four months of 2017, which amounts to $3.6 trillion annualized, “the largest CB buying on record.”  Aggregate Balance Sheet Of Large Central Banks, 2000 - 2017 - Click to enlarge BofA’s Michael Hartnett noted that supersized central bank...

Swiss Franc Switzerland Consumer Price Index (CPI) YoY, April 2017(see more posts on Switzerland Consumer Price Index, ) Source: investing.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates The US dollar has been mostly confined to about a 30 pip range against the euro and yen in Asia and the European morning. Sterling is under a little pressure after a series of poor data, including larger than expected falls in manufacturing and...

Study in Switzerland – it’s high ranked Switzerland has the second best higher education system in the world, according to the 2017 Universitas 21 report, just below the United States. Is it just resources or is there another factor in play? The small alpine nation was ahead of the United Kingdom (ranked third) and its near neighbours in the classification of 50 countries, compiled by the Universitas 21external link...