Tag Archives: Featured

A momentous day, for sure, but one lost in what would turn out to be a seemingly endless sea of them. October 8, 2008, right in the thick of the world’s first global financial crisis (how could it have been global, surely not subprime mortgages?) the Federal Reserve took center stage; or tried to. Having bungled Lehman, botched AIG, and then surrendered to Treasury which then screwed up TARP, the world’s entire financial edifice was burning down while US...

So sorry, America, but your central bank is certifiably insane, and it’s not going to magically work out. History definitively shows that speculative bubbles always pop–always. Every speculative bubble mania, regardless of its supposed uniqueness–“it’s different this time”–pops. No speculative bubble has ever “reached a permanently high plateau” and then remained on the plateau for years. So what does the Federal Reserve do? It inflates the biggest speculative...

Imagine you are in command of the state, defined as an institution that possesses a territorial monopoly of ultimate decision making in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving the state and its agents itself, and, by implication, the right to tax, i.e., to unilaterally determine the price that your subjects must pay you to perform the task of ultimate decision making. To act under these constraints — or rather, lack of constraints — is what constitutes...

 Overview: The US dollar remains firm ahead of the July CPI release, and even though Chicago Fed Evans demurred from the hawkish talk, the market is getting more comfortable with the idea of a rate hike next year.   The implied yield of the December 2022 Eurodollar futures is rising for the sixth consecutive session.  Most emerging market currencies are also under pressure.  The JP Morgan Emerging Market Currency Index edged up yesterday to snap a five-day drop but...

It’s not just the trade data from individual countries. Take the WTO’s estimates which are derived from exports and imports going into or out of nearly all of them. These figures show that for all that recovery glory being printed up out of Uncle Sam’s checkbook, the American West Coast might be the only place where we can find anything resembling Warren Buffett’s red-hot claim. That’s a problem, and much bigger one that may otherwise appear especially given current...

The number of outstanding mortgages increased by 3% on last year Keystone / Urs Flueeler A report by the leading Swiss bank UBS has found an increased risk of a real estate bubble forming in Switzerland’s housing market. The UBS Swiss real estate bubble index has risen from 1.78 to 1.90 points, in the second quarter of 2021, remaining in the ‘risk zone’, according to a report published on Tuesday. The increase is driven by a rapid rise in prices in the Swiss...

No sooner did we write Silver Rorschach Test, than the price of gold flash-crashed, or was smashed down. On Sunday afternoon in Arizona—i.e. Monday morning in Australia and Asia—the gold price dropped sharply. Gold bug sources claim that the drop was $100, but as we can see from the price graph included in this report, the actual crash itself was about $70. Some of these sources were very quick to assert that the drop was caused by naked selling of gold futures...

We take a deep dive into what one country – Switzerland – is doing to honour the United Nations principles on business respects human rights. This content was published on August 10, 2021 – 10:00 In this episode Imogen Foulkes is joined by Susan Misicka, host of sister podcast The Swiss Connection. How much child labour is used to produce Swiss chocolate? External Content Why is so much gold refined in Switzerland? And what happens to that gold before it ends up on...

NZZ, August 10, 2021. PDF (title changed by NZZ). Should the SNB follow the Fed and the ECB and rework its strategy? There is a case for rethinking the broad inflation target, the monetary policy concept, and the communication strategy. Equally important is a strategy review outside of the SNB: The SNB cannot and must not decide about the framework within which it operates. Conclusion: Daher ist eine Strategieüberprüfung inner- und ausserhalb der SNB sinnvoll....

As my esteemed podcast co-host Emil Kalinowski has already mentioned (recurrently), we have, this year, two major anniversaries during these dog days of summer circled on our calendar. Today is, obviously, August 9 and for anyone the slightest familiar with the eurodollar story, that date is seared into their consciousness for as long as it will take to rebuild from the ashes created by the monetary fire lit that day. It has been, sadly, fourteen long years and only...