Tag Archives: Featured

La verità, vi prego, sul neo-liberismo: Il poco che c’è, il tanto che manca (The truth, please, on neoliberalism) There are few things nowadays that ignite more hatred, especially within university campuses, than declaring oneself to be a neoliberal (if the reader is not convinced, he is invited to try it himself and see what happens). Both exponents from the Right and from the Left, in fact, view neoliberalism as the instrumentum regni with which global political...

The lesson of China’s Cultural Revolution in my view is that once the lid blows off, everything that was linear (predictable) goes non-linear (unpredictable). There is a whiff of unease in the air as beneath the cheery veneer of free money for almost everyone, inequality and polarization are rapidly consuming what’s left of common ground in America. Though there are many systemic differences between China and the U.S., humans in every nation are all still running...

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by 0.07% to 1.0997 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, April 12(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: Risk appetites have not returned from the weekend. Equities are heavy, and bond yields softer. The dollar is drifting lower in Europe. China’s unusually candid admission of the shortcomings of its vaccine and record new cases in India saw all the equity markets in the region fall. Only...

Grundsätzlich herrscht, abseits von Kreisen eingefleischter Marxisten, weitgehend Einigkeit darüber, dass der Wettbewerb zwischen den Anbietern von Waren und Dienstleistungen Kreativität freisetzt, Innovationen fördert, die Produktivität steigert und die Preise für die Konsumenten senkt. Ohne Wettbewerb bedeutet der Trabant den Gipfel der Automobilentwicklung; unter Wettbewerbsbedingungen entsteht der S-Klasse-Mercedes. Beides probiert – kein Vergleich. Um den...

The answer to the question, “What should I do to my portfolio today (this week, this month)? is almost always nothing. Humans, and especially portfolio managers, have a hard time believing that doing nothing is the right response….to anything…or nothing. We are programmed to believe that success comes from doing things, not not doing things. And so, often we look at markets on a day to day or week to week basis and think something of significance happened and we...

Senso consists of a screen and a floor panel that measures steps, weight displacement and balance as users attempt to complete a sequence of movements shown on the screen. Dividat AG Elderly participants who trained regularly on a fitness device developed by a Swiss company showed improvements in cognitive skills, such as attention, concentration, memory and orientation. The study, carried out by an international team in two Belgian care homes, relied on a fitness...

Lonza said it was recruiting from the Swiss labour market as well as from countries such as Germany, France, northern Italy and the United Kingdom. Keystone / Alessandro Della Valle The Swiss pharmaceutical company is recruiting workers to join its new plant in southern Switzerland, where three production lines have been set up to manufacture an active ingredient of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine. So far the firm has hired 650 new staff to work at its Visp site in canton...

Lacy Hunt at Hoisington Management has some interesting thoughts regarding the inflation debate and the potential for decelerating inflation. Case For Decelerating Inflation In its Quarterly Review and Outlook for the First Quarter of 2021 Lacy Hunt makes a case for decelerating inflation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, disinflation is more likely than accelerating inflation. Since prices deflated in the second quarter of 2020, the annual inflation rate will move...

The reality of federal spending under Donald Trump did much to put to rest the obviously wrong and long-disproved notion that Republicans are the political party of “fiscal responsibility.” With George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, it was pretty much “full speed ahead” as far as federal spending was concerned. Under George W. Bush, some of the biggest budget-busting years were those during which the Republicans also controlled Congress. Trump, of course, carried the...

Americans appear to be growing more concerned about the skyrocketing national debt level – officially $28.1 trillion and counting. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s monthly Fiscal Confidence Index recently shed five points, dropping to a level of 47, in the wake of the Biden Administration’s latest $2 trillion stimulus package. That $2 trillion bill is simply piled on top of already massive budget deficits. And it adds furthers to concerns over the country’s...