Tag Archives: Featured

Over the last few years, digital currencies and gold have become decent barometers of speculative investor appetite. Such isn’t surprising given the evolution of the market into a “casino” following the pandemic, where retail traders have increased their speculative appetites. “Such is unsurprising, given that retail investors often fall victim to the psychological behavior of the “fear of missing out.” The chart below shows the “dumb money index” versus the S&P...

Switzerland’s central bank, the Swiss National Bank (SNB), lost $3.6 billion in 2023,  after a gigantic loss of $150 billion in 2022. But after booking these losses, and properly subtracting them from its capital, the SNB still had positive capital of over $70 billion. This gives it the quite respectable capital to total assets ratio of 7.9%. All of these numbers are after marking its investments to market, as is required by the SNB’s governing law, so the capital is...

One of the first laws of economics—in fact, the condition that makes economics possible and necessary—is scarcity. On page one of Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell wrote, “Without scarcity, there is no need to economize—and therefore no economics.”While defining scarcity and its critical role in economics, I like to ask my students in a Christian school a question to tease this out: Would scarcity have existed in the Garden of Eden?Apparently Bob Murphy has tackled just...

One would guess the folly of rent control regulations needn’t be explained any further. If rents are held in place by government edict, landlords have no incentive to maintain apartment units to attract renters, the housing stock ultimately deteriorates, and homelessness increases. But, as Bloomberg reports, “Tougher rent control, returning worldwide, destroys $75 billion in property value. Cash-strapped tenants cheer as they maintain a foothold in the city.”That was...

Overview: News that the Japanese economy expanded rather than contracted in Q4 23 has fanned expectations that rates could be as early as next week. This is helping keep the yen supported, though it remains in the pre-weekend range, albeit barely. While the dollar is softer but consolidating against the euro, Swiss franc, and Canadian dollar, it slightly firmer against the Antipodeans and Scandis. Sterling is also in a narrow range, but with a softer bias. Most...

Artificial intelligence (AI) cannot distinguish fact from fiction. It also isn’t creative or can create novel content but repeats, repackages, and reformulates what has already been said (but perhaps in new ways).I am sure someone will disagree with the latter, perhaps pointing to the fact that AI can clearly generate, for example, new songs and lyrics. I agree with this, but it misses the point. AI produces a “new” song lyric only by drawing from the data of...

President Biden needs an economics lesson. Demonstrating his ignorance of economics, his recent State of the Union speech regaled us with a laundry list of legal business pricing strategies that he wants to see restricted or banned by federal agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). These pricing strategies include what Biden pejoratively calls “junk fees”, “shrinkflation”, “greedflation”, “surge pricing”,...

One thing to be said in favor of the American conservative establishment is the fact that they at least pay lip service to the idea of a free market. They have also memorized the typical talking points in its defense, including the greater prosperity it provides, the morality of private property, and the impossibility of successful central planning. On this last point, however, mainstream conservatives generally fail to extend the logic to perhaps its most obvious...

  Die Ökonomie der Unentgeltlichkeit 8. März 2024 – Interview mit Jörg Guido Hülsmann The Misesian (TM): Die wirtschaftlichen Mechanismen des Schenkens und der Wohltätigkeit waren lange Zeit ein vernachlässigtes Thema in der volkswirtschaftlichen Lehre und Forschung. Was hat Ihre Untersuchung zu diesem Thema veranlasst? Jörg Guido Hülsmann (JGH): Die ökonomische Literatur zu Geschenken ist ziemlich umfangreich. Es stimmt jedoch, dass diese Schriften...

Presidential elections and market corrections have a long history of companionship. Given the rampant rhetoric between the right and left, such is not surprising. Such is particularly the case over the last two Presidential elections, where polarizing candidates trumped policies. From a portfolio management perspective, we must understand what happens during election years concerning the stock market and investor returns. Since 1833, the S&P 500 index has...