Tag Archives: Featured

An average Swiss household spends more than 14% of its gross income on housing and energy. © Keystone/Christian Beutler The average private household in Switzerland spent about 31% of its income on taxes, social security and health insurance premiums in 2019. That’s 1% up on the previous year, slightly reducing the individual budget and the chances of setting money aside. Latest official figures show that the average gross monthly income was CHF9,582 ($10,301) up...

Do governments hate gold? The answer: Yes — Governments hate gold because they cannot print it, and it is difficult for them to control. Because they cannot print it or easily control it, gold has little use to them during the never-ending schemes to tax and then redistribute wealth. India is a recent example of a government trying to control gold imports through increased taxation on imports and imposing rules, such as that importers had to re-export 20% of imports...

Since the very beginning of the covid panic, the narrative has been this: implement severe lockdowns or your population will experience a bloodbath. Morgues will be overwhelmed, the death total toll will be astounding. On the other hand, we were assured those jurisdictions that do lock down would see only a fraction of the death toll. Then, once vaccines became available, the narrative was modified to “Get shots in arms and then covid will stop spreading. Those...

Overview: Concerns that a new mutation of the Covid virus has shaken the capital markets.  Equities are off hard, and bonds have rallied.  In the foreign exchange market, the Japanese yen and Swiss franc have rallied.  While there may be a safe haven bid, there also appears to be an unwinding of positions that require the buying back of the funding currencies, which is also lifting the euro.  The currencies levered from growth, the dollar-bloc and Scandis are...

25.11.2021 – Switzerland’s settlement and urban areas have expanded by a further 181 km2 in the last ten years, which is twice the area of Lake Zurich. Compared with previous decades, however, settlement growth has slowed down slightly. Forests have also expanded, but only in the mountains. Like settlements, they have grown primarily at the expense of agricultural area. In the high mountain regions, glaciers have continued to shrink unabatedly. These are the latest...

Die Rallye hat sich ein wenig beruhigt. Trotzdem liegt der BTC in der Nähe seines Allzeithochs. Dem Kursanstieg zum Trotz bleiben jedoch die Gebühren auf moderatem Niveau und sanken zuletzt sogar deutlich – woran liegt es? Bitcoin News: Gebühren für Bitcoin sinken trotz Höchstkursen Arcane Research hat festgestellt, dass die Gebühren im Wochenvergleich um 26 Prozent gesunken sind. Dies hat vor allem zwei Gründe: Erstens werden immer mehr Bitcoin-Transaktionen über...

When Japan’s Ministry of Trade, Economy, and Industry (METI) reported earlier in November that Japanese Industrial Production (IP) had plunged again during the month of September 2021, it was so easy to just dismiss the decline as a product of delta COVID. According to these figures, industrial output fell an unsightly 5.4%…from August 2021, meaning month-over-month not year-over-year. Altogether, IP in Japan is down just over 10% since June, nearly 11% since...

The way that the Swiss watch television today has changed a bit since the 1960s. akg-images In a little over a year Play Suisse, the streaming service of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC), has become a major player in the Swiss digital landscape, surpassing platforms like Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video. Critic Max Borg looks at the strengths and weaknesses of Play Suisse and its rivals. To mark the first anniversary of Play Suisse, the SBC, SWI swissinfo.ch’s...

Throughout the corona “pandemic” the Holy Grail of public health officials has been vaccination: only by vaccinating enough people—first the elderly and infirm, then all adults, and now even children—can the nefarious virus be beaten. As vaccination has proven less than wholly successful in preventing the spread of coronavirus, with studies showing rapidly declining protection from the vaccines, governments have doubled down, introducing not only “booster” shots for...

The opportunity to lower our exposure to risk is always present in some fashion, but embracing this opportunity becomes critical when precarity and change-points rise like restless seas. The Chinese characters that comprise the equivalent of “crisis” are famously–and incorrectly–translated as “danger” and “opportunity.” This mis-translation has reached the peculiar prominence of being repeated often enough to be taken as accurate, but according to Wikipedia and...