Tag Archives: Featured

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.37% to 1.0969 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, May 11(see more posts on Business, EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: The sell-off in US shares yesterday has triggered sharp global losses today, and there is no flight into fixed income as benchmark yields are higher across the board.  Nor is the dollar serving as much as a safe haven. It is mostly softer against the major currencies. Japan and...

“If everyone sees it, is it still a bubble?” That was a great question I got over the weekend. As a “contrarian” investor, it is usually when “everyone” is talking about an event; it doesn’t happen. As Mark Hulbert noted recently, “everyone” is worrying about a “bubble” in the stock market. To wit: “To appreciate how widespread current concern about a bubble is, consider the accompanying chart of data from Google Trends. It plots the relative frequency of Google...

It looks like the hiring (and retention) shortage isn’t just for rank-and-file minimum wage jobs. UBS has now said that, amidst historic competition and a “retention crisis” in the investment banking world (which we noted weeks ago), it is going to pay a one time $40,000 bonus to its global banking analysts when they are promoted. This is double what some of the bank’s competitors are offering. It’s part of a push for lenders “to reward and retain younger employees...

Anton “Toni” Piëch, co-founder of the Swiss electric car manufacturer Piëch Automotive, tells SWI swissinfo.ch why he chose Zurich and how he intends to make his mark in a highly competitive market with battery-powered cars for “purists who love technology”. Piëch, who says he wants to breathe new life into the Swiss car industry, is a scion of an Austrian-German family with a rich automobile history: his great-grandfather was Ferdinand Porsche and his father,...

[Chapter 19 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released Conceived in Liberty, vol. 5, The New Republic: 1784–1791.] The most important battle of the August days of the Constitutional Convention was waged, as had been the battle over the three-fifths clause, between the North and South and had at its heart the institution of slavery. One of the small number of restrictions on Congress in the draft Constitution was a prohibition of any tax on exports, or of any tax or...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.43% to 1.0976 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, May 10(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: Last week’s cyberattack on the largest US gasoline pipeline continues to lift oil and gasoline prices. The June gasoline futures gapped higher to extend last week’s 2.4% gain but has subsequently moved lower to enter the gap. June WTI is firm and holding above $65. The supply disruption...

05.05.2021 – The consumer price index (CPI) increased by 0.2% in April 2021 compared with the previous month, reaching 100.8 points (December 2020 = 100). Inflation was +0.3% compared with the same month of the previous year. These are the results of the Federal Statistical Office (FSO).The 0.2% increase compared with the previous month can be explained by several factors including rising prices for fruiting vegetables. Clothing also recorded a price increase, as did...

But weirdly, and irrationally, bubbles pop anyway. At long last, the moment you’ve been hoping for has arrived: you’re pitching your screenplay to a producer. Your agent is cautious but you’re confident nobody else has concocted a story as outlandish as yours. Your agent gives you the nod and you’re off and running: Writer: Two guys start a cryptocurrency as a joke to parody the crypto craze, and they name it KittyCoin. It goes nowhere but then the greatest...

After firing a raft of senior employees including its head of risk, Lara Warner, Credit Suisse has been struggling to move past a series of major risk-management failures that together could cost the bank $10 billion, or more, though the final tally of losses from the Archegos blowup isn’t yet known as the bank weighs whether it should cover some client losses associated with the “low risk” trade-finance funds that collapsed earlier this year. Following reports that...

One of the stark developments since the initial shock of the pandemic has been the aggressiveness of the US monetary and fiscal response. This was also true in dealing with the Great Financial Crisis. The divergence then and now had shaped the investment climate. On a per-capita basis, the pandemic struck the US harder than in most other high-income countries, and some see the wide disparity of income and wealth as a contributing factor. In any event, the vaccine...