Tag Archives: Featured

The Federal Reserve’s various branches don’t just do manufacturing surveys anymore. This is a modern economy, after all, meaning industry isn’t the same top dog as what it used to be. While still important, and still able to tear down even the global-iest synchronized of growth-y, services are the big macro enchilada. Reflecting this fact, there are now regional Fed services surveys producing services indices to go along with the manufacturing sentiment stuff. I’ll...

At the core of the entrepreneurial orientation that is the engine of vibrant, growing, value-creating, customer-first businesses, we find the principles of subjectivism and subjective value. Subjective value embraces not only the value the customer seeks, but also the value that entrepreneurs establish in their companies: capital value. Once businesses master these two principles in combination, they can open new horizons of innovation and growth. Key Takeaways...

In a piece of news that shocked the mainstream media, but which shocked no one familiar with the academic industry writ large, retired US Army general John Allen was forced to resign as president of the Brookings Institution after it was revealed the FBI was investigating him for lobbying on behalf of the Qatari monarchy. Of course, the real news, scarcely noted by the Washington Post, New York Times, or any other purported paper of record, is that Allen was only...

New technologies, developed to improve our society, are increasingly being used to wage war. Switzerland, which leads the development of autonomous drones, is very much affected by this phenomenon. But regulating it is very difficult and requires a joint effort by the international community – a tall order when interests collide. The war in Ukraine has emphasised that all innovations can have both civilian and military applications. It’s a two-way street that has...

© Cameracraft8 | Dreamstime.com This week, the Swiss franc rose to beyond parity with the euro as traders sought safe haven assets as concerns about risks to global growth grew. The Euro-Swiss Franc pair fell below 1.00 franc per euro during the morning of 29 June 2022 and remained below 1.00 until the morning of 1 July 2022 when the value of a euro exceed that of a franc. The pair has not been this low since 2015. The rise has been driven by the franc’s haven status...

30.06.2022 – Nominal retail trade turnover adjusted for sales days and holidays remained stable in May 2022 compared with the same month of the previous year with a rate of change of 0.0%. Seasonally adjusted, nominal turnover rose by 1.6% compared with the previous month. These are provisional findings from the Federal Statistical Office (FSO). Real turnover adjusted for sales days and holidays fell in the retail sector by 1.6% in May 2022 compared with the...

The seven cartel members had fixed the prices of new Volkswagen cars for years Keystone / Filip Singer A group of Volkswagen dealers in southern Switzerland has been fined CHF44 million ($46 million) by the Federal Competition Commission (Comco). The seven cartel members, including car importer AMAG, had fixed the prices of new Volkswagen cars for years. “The car dealers colluded on all sales activities in Ticino. They made deals on public sector submissions, agreed...

With a recession looming over the average American, the group to blame is pretty obvious, this group being the central bankers at the Federal Reserve, who inflate the supply of currency in the system, that currency being the dollar. This is what inflation is, the expansion of the money supply either through the printing press or adding zeros to a computer screen. It has gotten so bad that in the last twenty-two months, 80 percent of all US dollars in existence have...

Ben Bernanke once admitted how the job of the post-truth “central banker” is to try to convince the market to do your work for you. What he didn’t say was that this was the only prayer officials had for any success. Because if the market ever decided that talk wasn’t enough, only real money in hand would do, everyone’d be screwed. Yes, 2008. Also everything after. The Chinese have followed closely this style having realized what took Bernanke too long. That is, the...

Putting this all together, it’s clear that the source of the current housing bubble is the explosion of financial speculation fueled by central bank policies. Those benefiting from speculative bubbles have powerful incentives to deny the bubble can bust.Rationalizations abound as bubbles inflate, and the continued ascent of speculative bets seems to “prove” the rationalizations are correct. But bubbles arise from speculative excesses, and once these reach extremes...