Tag Archives: Featured

Twenty-twenty marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of a book that has had an expanding influence on the public conversation about market competition. Robert Frank and Philip Cook’s 1995 The Winner-Take-All Society argued that there are an increasing number of markets in which small differences in performance give rise to enormous differences in rewards. As John Kenneth Galbraith described it in a review of that book, the consequence is that “the one who wins gets it...

This is happening a lot in Switzerland. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally Even good drivers might struggle to fit their cars into the allotted parking spaces in Switzerland. Yet Swiss cities don’t necessarily want to provide larger spaces. The Swiss Association of Road and Traffic Experts has presented a proposal to increase the standard size of parking spaces. Currently, the Swiss standard width is 2.35 metres for private parking spaces and 2.50m for public ones. The new...

With the development of the Austrian Business Paradigm and the Austrian Business Model, and tools such as the “Value Learning Process,” businesses of all kinds can utilize the deep insights of Austrian economics to further enhance how they facilitate value for their customers. John Boles — an avid listener of the Economics for Entrepreneurs Podcast — provides an example of how he applies these insights at his accounting firm. Here is a summary resource and a...

I joined Ben Lichtenstein, host of the morning futures program at TDAmeritrade.  It is in the futures market that I began my career, and where I gained respect for local traders, who do not have a large institutional backing such as a bank or hedge fund, and are trading their own capital, and taking the risk often from those institutional participants.  There is truly a David vs. Goliath drama being played out with asymmetries of information and depth of capital...

A police officer in the Swiss resort of Villars-sur-Ollon checks whether Covid-19 measures are being observed. Keystone / Valentin Flauraud Gérard Brudi, who rents two apartments to winter workers in the popular French ski resort of Val Thorens, has not had a single booking this year. Despite snow falling and sunny weather, the ski lifts are closed. The travel reps that would normally host guests have little more to do than check empty chalets for freezing pipes. Val...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The New York Times managed to find some young people whose silver spoons provide a sour taste in their mouths. To hear them talk, their good fortune is making them sick. 

In 2019, we wrote about how corporate share repurchases, or “stock buybacks,” had accounted for nearly all buying in the market. A year later, that significant support for asset prices has reversed. While markets have certainly been on a tear this year, due to massive amounts of Federal Stimulus, it has been an advance solely on valuation expansion. While the decline in 2020 earnings was no surprise given the pandemic, earnings were already declining in 2019. The...

The foreign exchange market sees an average daily turnover of something on the magnitude of $6.6 trillion a day.  In a week, the turnover is sufficient to more than cover world trade for a year.  It is the largest of the capital markets.  Trends in the currency market can last for years. A little more than a year ago, we concluded that the dollar’s third significant rally since the end of Bretton Woods was over and that a cyclical dollar decline was at hand.  Yet the...

Switzerland joins at least ten European countries, including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium, which have said they are taking measures to prevent people arriving from Britain Keystone / Neil Hall Switzerland has joined other European countries in suspending flights from the United Kingdom and South Africa after reports of a fast-spreading new coronavirus strain. “Due to the new epidemiological situation in Britain and South Africa, the Federal...

The 2020 election failed to live up to the projections of many pollsters and Democratic strategists . The predicted landslide failed to materialize, and the Democrats lost seats in the House. This means in 2022 the Democrats will be defending a razor-thin majority in the House—a majority they’re almost certain to lose in a mid-term election if Biden is the final victor. The Democrats did well. But not that well. Nonetheless, Nancy Pelosi, in the days following the...