Tag Archives: Featured

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Switzerland’s four largest buildings insurers estimate the costs of recent weather events could reach half a billion francs across Switzerland, reported RTS. According to Grégoire Deiss, who works for the cantonal buildings insurer ECAB in Fribourg, the cost of recent storms and flooding could be around CHF 500 million across all of Switzerland, a figure he based on claims that have been made so far.

In June 2004, Professor Hoppe visited the Mises Institute in Auburn to deliver an ambitious series of lectures titled Economy, Society, and History. Over ten lectures, one each morning and afternoon for a week, Dr. Hoppe presented nothing short of a sweeping historical narrative and vision for a society rooted in markets and property. Delivered only from notes, to an audience of academics and intellectuals, the lectures showed astonishing depth and breadth.Even the...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The youth chapter of the PLR (FDP) has successfully collected enough signatures for an initiative to raise the official retirement age in Switzerland to 66 years old, reported RTS. On 16 July 2021, initiative organisers submitted 145,000 voter signatures as part of the formal process of launching a referendum in Switzerland.

Central banks’ massive Quantitative Easing (QE) programs have come under scrutiny many times since the central banks fired up the printing press and began quantitative easing programs en masse after the 2008-09 Great Financial Crisis. However, the increase in central bank assets due to quantitative easing programs during the crisis pale in comparison to the QE programs during the Covid pandemic. As economies recovered after the Great Financial Crisis many worried...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]89.2 China Warns World of (Next?) Dollar Disorder. The People’s Bank of China lowers its bank Required Reserve Ratio to get money into a slowing economy. A lowered RRR means that there aren’t enough (euro)dollars flowing into China. Why? Because there aren’t enough (euro)dollars in the world. A lower RRR is a warning for the whole world.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Frankfurt, Bremen, Hamburg, Luebeck are large and brilliant, and their impact on the prosperity of Germany is incalculable. Yet, would they remain what they are if they were to lose their independence and be incorporated?”— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Not only does bitcoin fail to satisfy the notion of being a currency without a government, but the cryptocurrency is also not a reliable inflation hedge nor a safe haven investment, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a probability researcher and former quantitative trader, says in a recent paper.

Tangled in the cloud: a Federal court will now review the contract decision. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally Google has appealed a recent Swiss decision to award a cloud-computing contract to five other digital firms. The tender process has also come under criticism by defenders of data sovereignty. Google’s appeal targets the government’s decision last month to name US companies Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, and Chinese firm Alibaba, as winning candidates to create...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]This month marks the five-year anniversary of Monetary Metals paying interest on gold. It was July 2016 when we offered our first Gold Fixed Income True Gold Lease. The gold lease was to Valaurum for manufacturing their flagship product, the Aurum®. It paid 3.0% interest on gold to investors (you can read the original press release here).

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Global factors, meaning that the wave of significantly higher deflationary potential (therefore, diminishing inflationary chances which were never good to begin with) in global bond yields the past five months have seemingly focused on troubles brewing outside the US. Overseas turmoil, it was called back in 2015, leaving by default a picture of relative American strength and harmony.