Tag Archives: Featured

President Joe Biden has unveiled a three-part plan to fight inflation — or at least make people think he is fighting inflation. One part of the plan involves having government agencies “fix” the supply chain problems that have led to shortages of numerous products. Of course, any attempt by the government to solve the supply chain problems (which were caused by prior government interventions such as shutting down the economy for over a year) will not just fail to...

Swiss President Ignazio Cassis at the 51st annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, on May 24, 2022. © Keystone / Laurent Gillieron The Swiss are hosting a major international conference on reconstruction in Ukraine at the beginning of July. The agenda and a participants’ list are currently taking shape.  However, it’s unclear how much international enthusiasm this event – and its aims – will garner in the end. International support for...

As Russian political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky has quite rightly said, one should not consider the five-thousand-plus sanctions imposed against the Russian Federation as of this writing as sanctions in the normal diplomatic and economic sense. They are a conditional “second front,” a blow aimed at dismantling the Russian economy, the Russian social structure, and the institutional framework in response to the corresponding actions of the Russian authorities, with the...

The Volcker Myth is simple because there isn’t math for it just voodoo economics (to borrow George HW Bush’s phrase). In theory, the FOMC finally realized after more than a decade of currency devastation and its economic, financial, and social consequences, hey, inflation and money. Once Paul Volcker took over in ’79, he acted on the belated realization, seeking to get the Great Inflation under control by restricting, well, something that seems like money. All the...

Ob das Luna (Terra)-Projekt noch gerettet werden kann, steht in den Sternen. Nachdem der ursprüngliche Cryptocoin bereits abstürzte, ist jetzt auch der Relaunch gescheitert – zumindest vorerst. Crypto News: Auch Luna-Neustart gescheitertDer Kopf von Terra, Do Kwon, ist vielen dadurch bekannt geworden, dass sein Projekt einen historischen Absturz erlebte. Im Mai dieses Jahres verlor Terra innerhalb von ungefähr 5 Tagen seinen Wert vollständig. Von fast 100 US-Dollar...

The most important sustainable themes in 2021 were energy, social concerns and environmental issues. Keystone / Laurent Gillieron The volume of sustainable investments in Switzerland increased by almost a third last year, reaching an all-time high of CHF1.98 trillion ($2 trillion). This continuing growth – the rate is almost the same as last year – is mainly due to the increased use of sustainable investment approaches and the overall positive market development in...

Overview: Equity markets in Asia Pacific and Europe are weaker.  The main exception in Asia Pacific was India, where the market rose by about 0.75%.  Europe's Stoxx 600 is lower for the third consecutive session and is now down on the week.  US futures are up around 0.3%-0.4%.  The 10-year Treasury yield is hovering a little above 3%.  European peripheral yields are softer ahead of the ECB meeting.  New Zealand’s 10-year yield jumped eight basis points in response...

There is scattered evidence that home prices are finally starting to slow down. But, if the phenomenon is system-wide, we’re still waiting to see the evidence in numbers. Last week, the most recent Case-Shiller national data, for example, showed that home prices in March rose an eye-popping 20 percent, year over year. That’s well in excess of what we saw during the height of the housing bubble leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. That makes nine months in a row...

If there was only one causal factor nudging the economy into recession, it might be a mild, brief recession. But with all five conditions in confluence, this recession will be unlike any other. Recessions reliably arise from the confluence of these conditions. Note that any one condition can trigger a recession, but no one condition guarantees a recession. Severe, long-lasting recessions occur when multiple conditions arise at the same time. 1. The business cycle....

Let’s engage in a thought experiment. Suppose that Ukraine was headed by a pro-Russia regime. After repeated failed attempts at assassination by the CIA, the Pentagon finally decides to invade Ukraine for the purpose of bringing about regime change — i.e., ousting the pro-Russia regime from power and replacing it with a pro-U.S. regime. What then would be the response of American statists, especially those within the U.S. mainstream press? There is no doubt about...