Tag Archives: Featured

The consumer price index (CPI) increased by 0.6% in January 2023 compared with the previous month, reaching 105.0 points (December 2020 = 100). Inflation was +3.3% compared with the same month of the previous year. These are the results of the Federal Statistical Office (FSO).The 0.6% increase compared with the previous month is due to several factors including rising prices for electricity and gas. Hotel accommodation also recorded a price increase, as did bread and...

Swiss chemists are running low on some medication Keystone / Expa/ Stefanie Oberhauser The Swiss pharmaceutical industry should be less dependent on active ingredients from Asia, says the president of the industry umbrella organisation, pharmaSuisse. Martine Ruggli has called for new drug companies to be built in Europe. If a drug runs out in Switzerland, it’s not available in the whole of Europe “in an extreme situation like the present one”, she said. With...

The aliens are coming! The aliens are coming!  No, I’m not talking about illegal aliens — that is, those immigrants who are trying to enter the United States without official permission. I’m talking about real aliens — the scary types from outer space. You know, the ones that look like ET. What other reasonable explanation could there be for those unidentified flying objects that the U.S. military has been shooting out of the skies over the northern United States? ...

Overview: A consolidative tone is mostly the theme of the day. The revisions to the US CPI announced before the weekend add to the uncertainty and focus on tomorrow’s report. At the same time, investors watch ongoing air space activity that has led to a few objects being shot down over the US and Canadian airspace. Yet the fear of escalation seems too mild still, but China’s ability to secure a rapprochement and leave its “wolf diplomacy” behind is strained, even as...

swissinfo.ch Swiss citizens look set to vote on a people’s initiative to try to ensure their economy never becomes cashless. What do the campaigners behind the idea really want? More from this author Cash is widely used in Switzerland, much more so than in many other countries. In Sweden, only 9% of people still pay with notes and coins; in the United States the figure is around 60%. Meanwhile, 97% of people in Switzerland still keep some cash at home or...

There is an element of inevitability in play, but it isn’t about central bank bailouts, it’s about Death Spirals and the collapse of unsustainable systems. The vapid discussions about “soft” or “hard” landings for the economy are akin to asking if the Titanic’sencounter with the iceberg was “soft” or “hard:” either way, the ship was doomed, just as the global economy is doomed by The New Normal of Death Spirals and Speculative Frenzies. Death Spirals are the...

[This article is the Introduction to Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities.] The world is now, and has always been, politically decentralized. At no time in history has all of humankind been ruled by a single political regime. Although the Roman Empire claimed to be universal, the Romans never even conquered all of Europe, let alone the whole inhabited world. Roman power never extended to India, China, Sub-Saharan...

© Keystone / Christian Beutler The president of the Swiss Employers’ Association wants to increase the potential workforce in Switzerland by 300,000 people. To achieve this, women, young people, the elderly and refugees must be integrated into the labour market or be given more work, said Valentin Vogt on Swiss public radio SRF on Saturday. “The lack of labour is the biggest obstacle to the growth of the Swiss economy,” he warned. According to him, if this...

As I sit here writing this Sunday afternoon, the US has just shot down a third UFO in the last 3 days in addition to the Chinese “weather” balloon last week. I have no insight into what these things might be but I do wonder if we haven’t declared war on the National Weather Service. The federal government has become so sprawling that it could easily  be the case that NORAD has no idea what the NWS has up in the air. And with all the UFO shooting going on, the NWS...

Widespread analysis of what went wrong at Credit Suisse converges on a constant theme: an international bank that lost touch with its Swiss roots, led by people who put profits ahead of prudence. This has resulted in massive financial losses and a restructuring drive that will see 9,000 staff lose their jobs. Credit Suisse CEO Ulrich Körner is leading a major restructuring of the bank. © Keystone / Michael Buholzer What happened? Credit Suisse has lurched from...