Tag Archives: Featured

The only rational response to this reality is to opt out, lay flat and let it rot. In my previous post, The Bubble Economy’s Credit-Asset Death Spiral, I described the self-reinforcing feedback of expanding credit and soaring asset valuations and how the only possible result of this financial perpetual motion machine was a death spiral of collapsing debt service, collateral and credit impulse. But this didn’t exhaust the destructive dynamics of this self-reinforcing...

In the laboratory of history, great inflation followed by great disinflation opens the road to monetary regime change. Sometimes the road leads to a better place. Think of the US return to gold in 1879 following the inflationary issue of greenbacks during the Civil War; or the era of the hard deutsche mark when the German Bundesbank responded to the great inflation and bust of the late 1960s and early 1970s by insulating its money from continuing US inflationary...

Overview: The sharp sell-off of US stocks yesterday as sapped the risk appetite today. Equities are being sold. Hong Kong and the index of mainland shares that are listed there led the regional decline with 3.2%-3.3% losses. Europe’s Stoxx 600 is off about 0.65% in late morning turnover, the fourth day of losses. US futures are trading with a lower bias as well. European 10-year bonds are mostly 1-2 bp firmer. The US 10-year Treasury is practically flat at 3.53%....

In the midst of excessive US economic and geopolitical uncertainties due to rampant inflation and the continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 7.7 percent October inflation report comes as a small relief. The unemployment rate touched 3.7 percent in October, remaining near the 3.5 percent prepandemic level and slightly above the 3.4 percent natural rate of unemployment of the fourth quarter of 2021. The Covid Inflation The general increase in price levels, most...

Swiss ski resorts are considering reducing the speed of ski lifts among various measures aimed at helping save energy this winter. © Keystone/gian Ehrenzeller Swiss ski resorts are gearing up for their biggest winter season since the Covid-19 pandemic. But soaring power prices in the wake of the Ukraine war have resort managers scrambling to find ways to save energy. The first ski slopes opened in the Swiss Alps in early November thanks to fresh snow in...

Pure online brands are among the biggest winners this year © Keystone / Christian Beutler Online media replaced television as the most influential media genre in Switzerland for the first time in 2021, according to a study. Large brands such as 20 Minuten and Swiss public radio and television, SRF, lost influence in favour of smaller titles. In terms of importance for opinion-forming, print titles slipped to the bottom of the ranking, even behind radio and social...

6 Outstanding Students Earn Almost $10,000 in Tuition Assistance Eagle, Idaho (December 6, 2022) – Six outstanding students beat out almost 100 of their high-school and college peers in making the best case for sound money through an international, gold-backed scholarship competition… …and the winners walked away with a total of $9,500 in scholarship awards for their exceptional, thought-provoking essays. For the sixth-straight year, Money Metals Exchange, the U.S....

Overview: The 11 bp jump in the 10-year US yield yesterday after dropping nearly 26 bp in the previous three sessions, helped the greenback recover and took a toll on stocks. Still, the S&P 500 is above the low set on November 30 (~3939) before Fed Chair Powell’s talk that day. Global equities were dragged lower today. Most large bourses in the Asia Pacific region fell, including Hong Kong’s Hang Seng and the index of mainland companies that trade in Hong Kong....

Who believed that central banks’ financial perpetual motion machine was anything more than trickery designed to generate phantom wealth? Central banks seem to have perfected the ideal financial perpetual motion machine: as credit expands, money pours into risk assets, which shoot higher under the pressure of expanding demand for assets that yield either hefty returns (junk bonds) or hefty capital gains as the soaring assets suck in more capital chasing returns. As...

“Today the tenets of this nineteenth-century philosophy of liberalism are almost forgotten. In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations.” —Ludwig von Mises, 1962 (emphasis added) F.A. Hayek is back in the public eye, thanks to a promising and weighty new biography from Professors Bruce Caldwell and Hansjörg Klausinger. Predictably,...