Tag Archives: Featured

I have taught economics long enough that I have made use of a variety of “trick” questions in introductory courses. I have found them, used well, to be pedagogically helpful. But not everyone agrees. Whether a question is considered a trick depends on one’s viewpoint. From a professor’s point of view, such questions are often a way of revealing whether students have grasped how to put a principle into action or correctly make a critical distinction in a...

This week, the government of the canton of Geneva changed a law to require non residential buildings, with some exceptions, to switch off their lights at night between 1am and 6am. Thursday’s parliamentary vote in favour of the move is expected to cut the canton’s electricity consumption by at least 1%. During parts of winter, Switzerland imports electricity to keep its lights on. In November 2021, Switzerland’s president warned the nation to prepare for electricity...

Einer Umfrage zufolge haben insgesamt rund 16 Prozent aller US-Amerikaner bereits Kryptowährungen wie Bitcoin oder Ether besessen. Eine am Donnerstag vom Pew Research Center veröffentlichte Umfrage ergab, dass etwa 16 Prozent der Amerikaner in irgendeiner Form in Kryptowährungen investiert, mit ihnen gehandelt oder sie verwendet haben. Die Zahl springt auf 31 Prozent für Menschen im Alter von 18-29 und sogar auf 43 Prozent für Männer in der gleichen Altersgruppe....

Switzerland joined the IMF in 1992 and is one of 24 members of the International Monetary and Financial Committee IMFC (Archive picture) Keystone/Stephen Jaffe/Handout The government seeks to renew its policy to support assistance measures by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It asked parliament to approve plans to continue international monetary cooperation to the tune of CHF10 billion ($10.8 billion) by 2028. The existing legal basis expires in April 2023,...

With inflation running at over 6 percent and interest rates on savings near zero, the Federal Reserve is delivering a negative 6 percent real (inflation-adjusted) return on trillions of dollars in savings. This is effectively expropriating American savers’ nest eggs at the rate of 6 percent a year. It is not only a problem in 2021, however, but an ongoing monetary policy problem of long standing. The Fed has been delivering negative real returns on savings for more...

The latest quarterly filing statement of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) has been issued. Switzerland’s publicly traded central bank had a decrease in the value of its US stock holdings by around $5 billion in Q3 of 2021, ending the quarter with a value of $157 billion. SNB currently has a profit of over $40 billion for the 9 months ended in the year. Perhaps subjective, it looks like a banner year for an entity who turns a profit through currency manipulation. As for...

We do not like Purchasing Power or Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER) as measurement for currencies. For us, the trade balance decides if a currency is overvalued. Only the trade balance can express productivity gains, while the REER assumes constant productivity in comparison to trade partners. Who has read Michael Pettis, knows that a rising trade surplus may also be caused by a higher savings rate while the trade partners decided to spend more. This is partially...

Given that political power in America is a pay-to-play auction in which the highest bidder wins, how this incomprehensibly lopsided ownership of wealth plays out is an open question. Wealth inequality easily falls into an abstraction unless we contextualize it in meaningful ways. I’ve annotated two St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED) charts–the net worth of America’s top 1% and the net worth of America’s bottom 50% of households, roughly 66 million households–to show...

By mid 2020, it was already becoming clear that the United States was experiencing a spike in crime. Indeed, by midyear, numerous media outlets were already reporting remarkably large increases in homicide in a number of cities. It was clear that if then-current trends continued, homicide rates in the United States would reach levels not seen in over a decade. With full-year data for 2020 now available from the FBI’s Crime in the USA report, we can see that those...

Singapore, 17 November – UBS is celebrating 50 successful years in Singapore with the official opening of its largest Asia Pacific office at 9 Penang Road. In the launch ceremony officiated by Axel A. Weber, Chairman of the Board of Directors UBS Group AG and Ralph Hamers, UBS Group CEO, the bank marked the occasion with clients, employees, and community activities in Singapore. Singapore’s Minister for Finance, Lawrence Wong, was the guest-of-honor for the event,...