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Keystone / Mast Irham The global community is slipping in its efforts to tackle money laundering and terrorist finance, a Swiss corruption watchdog warned on Monday. The Basel Institute on Governance said the global risk score increased from 5.22 to 5.3 out of 10 (highest risk score) in its Anti-Money Laundering Index. In 2021, Switzerland scored 4.89 in the independent annual ranking that examines the risk of money laundering in 110 jurisdictions. That marks an...

Alhambra CEO Joe Calhoun responds to questions about a slowing economy, long-term economic impacts of COVID, stock prices and the business cycle. [embedded content] [embedded content] You Might Also Like SNB Sight Deposits: Inflation is there, CHF must Rise 2021-09-13 Sight Deposits have risen by +0.2 bn CHF, this means that the SNB is intervening and buying Euros and Dollars....

Picture, if you will, a government that deliberately inflicts bad policy on the people. I know this sounds crazy, and could never happen, but please bear with me. Suppose the government criminalizes hiring someone who produces less than an arbitrary threshold. Or it forces the closure of all businesses deemed to be non “essential”. Or it makes all employers obtain government permission for a long and growing list of things, and then denies permission arbitrarily and...

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."–John M. Keynes1 It is held by many commentators that the Fed’s monetary policy, which is aimed at achieving price stability, is the key...

How (Not) to Win Friends and Influence People Overview: There are two big themes in the capital markets today. The first is the ongoing push of the Chinese state into what was the private sector. Today’s actions involve breaking Ant’s lending arms into separate entities, with the state taking a stake. This weighed on Chinese shares and Hong Kong, where many are lists. On the other hand, Japanese markets extended their recent gains. The Nikkei, for example, is has...

The US dollar enjoyed a firmer bias last week despite the disappointing jobs growth reported on September 3.  The Norwegian krone was the only major currency that gained against the greenback.  Brent was less than a quarter of a dollar firmer, so the likelihood of the central bank raising rates later this month offers a more compelling explanation.  The Australian dollar was the weakest, even though the Reserve Bank of Australia signaled it would proceed with plans...

The Swiss property market continues to heat up during the pandemic. Keystone / Christof Schuerpf The risk of a housing bubble has increased in the last three months, but the Swiss National Bank (SNB) is unconcerned about a general inflationary threat. In an interview with the SonntagsZeitung newspaper on Sunday, SNB vice-chairman Fritz Zurbrügg said that housing market had heated further since June. “We cannot sit back and relax,” he said. “But we have also always...

The financialized American economy and State are now totally dependent on a steady flow of lies and propaganda for their very survival. Were the truth told, the status quo would collapse in a putrid heap.Go ahead and be evil, because everyone else is evil, too, because being evil serves everyone’s interests far better than maintaining integrity, for integrity will cost you more than you can afford. In other words, lying, fraud, embezzlement, misrepresentation of...

Our healthcare system is broken, a fact nobody would have disputed in precovid days. Regulatory capture is a reality, and the pharmaceutical industry is fraught with examples. Yet we trusted private-public partnerships to find an optimal solution to a global pandemic, assuming a crisis would bring out the best in historically corrupt institutions. Here is a brief list of less-than-savory behavior demonstrated by our titans of healthcare:  Pfizer and Johnson &...

The voluntary site allowed people to register their vaccinations online, but the probe found their data was not secure. Keystone / Gaetan Bally A federal investigator has found “serious” technical failures at voluntary vaccination registry mesvaccins.ch, which was closed in May following data security concerns. “The technical failures were indeed very serious, affecting all services of the platform,” Federal Data Protection Commissioner Adrian Lobsiger told Swiss...