Tag Archives: Featured

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announces a deal on December 24 Paul Grover Britain has finally negotiated a deal with the European Union. The European Court of Justice will not act as a court of arbitration. Some Swiss voices are now calling for Switzerland to get the same deal. This content was published on December 28, 2020 – 13:51December 28, 2020 – 13:51 Sibilla Bondolfi The UK and the EU managed to agree on a last-minute trade deal after all. It...

Have the Swiss and European Union economies already been through the worst, or will the pandemic cause more damage in 2021? Keystone / Martin Ruetschi Lockdown, home office, travel bans. The pandemic has shaken up the economy, but its disruptive power is having a selective effect. While the pharmaceutical industry is sailing through the crisis unscathed, the watch industry is being hit harder than any time since the last world war. What is the future of...

A parking fine with a QR code in Zurich in July © Keystone / Christian Beutler Digitalisation is increasing pressure on state authorities, with almost three-quarters of Swiss expecting more digital services from the authorities, according to a survey by consultants Deloitte. This content was published on December 29, 2020 – 08:39December 29, 2020 – 08:39 Keystone-SDA/ts Whether it’s paying parking fines or obtaining motorway toll stickers, Swiss want to be able to...

Alain Berset speaking about his experience as health minister in 2020 SRF In an interview with Swiss public television, SRF, Health Minister Alain Berset has acknowledged that Switzerland made mistakes in managing the coronavirus outbreak. “We were too lax,” Berset said, pointing out that in the summer – after the first wave – people had the feeling that the worst was over. “And then we were far too optimistic when we thought we could reopen the big events in the...

The coronavirus has dominated all of our lives in recent months. Radical paths were taken by politicians in the form of lockdowns to contain the pandemic. But we should recognize that even if the coronavirus is a (major) challenge for us, we always have to keep a holistic view of world events. Just as there are epidemiological factors to consider in this crisis, there are also economic, social, cultural, political and other health factors at play. It is precisely...

So party on, because “the worst year ever” is ending and the rebound of financial markets, already the greatest in recorded history, will only become more fabulous. Of the lavish banquet of absurdities laid out in 2020, one of the most delectable is Time magazine’s December 14 cover declaring that 2020 was the “worst year ever.” You’re joking, right? In history’s immense tapestry of human misery, it’s not even in the top 100 worst years. Consider 1177 B.C., when...

The term environmental social governance (ESG) investing is relatively new. As described in Forbes, [An] approach that is slowly on the rise is ESG activism, where an activist fund will take a position in the security of a company with the aim of campaigning to make its business better in terms of governance, less environmentally unfriendly and more socially responsible. But the concept of morally selective investing is not totally new, as it gained a good deal of...

21. Dezember 2020 – von Michael Rectenwald [Dies ist die Abschrift des gleichnamigen Vortrags, der auf dem Ron Paul Symposium des Mises Institute am 7. November 2020 in Angleton, Texas, gehalten wurde.] “Sei nicht böse” ist zwar nicht mehr länger Google’s offizielles Unternehmensmotto, aber es verbleibt Bestandteil des letzten Satzes in seinem Verhaltenskodex. Unter ‘nichts Böses machen’ versteht Google nach wie vor, dass «alles [was es tut] in Verbindung mit...

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...