Tag Archives: Featured

The bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich shows a fatal flaw in how most people think about inflation. Are you familiar with the bet? Ehrlich wrote a book titled The Population Bomb. He held a pessimistic view of the future, in which population growth would outstrip resources (essentially the same as Thomas Malthus). Simon disagreed. So in 1980, they made a famous bet. Ehrlich thought that the real cost of commodities would be higher in 10 years. Simon said they...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.22% to 1.0629 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, July 10(see more posts on EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: Record fatalities in a few US states, coupled with new travel restrictions in Italy and Australia, have given markets a pause ahead of the weekend. News that two state-backed funds in China took profits snapped the eight-day advance in Shanghai at the same time as there is an attempt...

The Swiss travel and tourism sector has been hard hit by the effects of the coronavirus crisis. Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. German tour operator TUI is to close eight of its 62 branches in Switzerland with the loss of around 70 jobs, owing to the effects of the coronavirus crisis. “We are assuming we will organise around 70% fewer trips than originally planned this summer,” says TUI Switzerland’s managing director Philipp von Czapiewski...

Unlike some sentiment indicators, the ISM Non-manufacturing, in particular, actual trade in goods continued to contract in May 2020. Both exports and imports fell further, though the rate of descent has improved. In fact, that’s all the other, more subdued PMI’s like Markit’s have been suggesting. Getting closer to a bottom. Unlike any of the sentiment numbers, however, these trade figures better demonstrate just how far from a rebound let alone recovery the world...

Economist Irving Fisher famously said just before the 1929 stock market crash, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Whoops. Fisher wasn’t just any old economist. Joseph Schumpeter called him “the greatest economist the United States has ever produced.” Milton Friedman and James Tobin agreed. After the sharp March COVID crash, stocks have come roaring back: nevermind the pandemic, protests in the streets, shuttered businesses, and...

In this episode of our Inside Geneva podcast, we look at the role of the World Trade Organization as it chooses a new leader amid challenging times. Every country has to trade: to sell goods, and to import others that aren’t produced at home. But who makes the rules around trade? Host Imogen Foulkes is joined by former World Trade Organization (WTO) official Peter Ungphakorn, former Reuters correspondent and trade journalist Tom Miles, and analyst Daniel Warner, to...

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by 0.05% to 1.0623 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, July 9(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: Investors continue to clamor into risk assets. Led by Chinese shares, the MSCI Asia Pacific Index pushed higher for the third session this week to new five-month highs. Europe’s Dow Jones Stoxx 600 is trying to snap a two-day decline with the help of better than expected revenues for its...

World leaders have been addressing an online international summit on jobs and Covid-19. Keystone / Sandra Steins A new international platform is to be launched in Geneva to anticipate the effects of societal changes amidst the Covid-19 crisis, Swiss President Simonetta Sommaruga said on Wednesday. Switzerland is supporting this initiative and calls on states to help the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the face of the current jobs crisis, she added. The new...

Our society has a legal structure of self-rule and ownership of capital, but in reality it is a Neofeudal Oligarchy. Now that the pandemic is over and the economy is roaring again–so the stock market says–we’re heading straight back up into the good old days of 2019. Nothing to worry about, we’ve recovered the trajectory of higher and higher, better every day in every way. Everything’s great except the fatal rot at the heart of the U.S. economy hasn’t even been...

It is not disputed that the popular meaning of liberal has changed drastically over time. It is a well-known story how, around 1900, in English-speaking countries and elsewhere, the term was captured by writers who were essentially social democrats. Joseph Schumpeter (1954: p. 394) ironically observed that the enemies of the system of free enterprise paid it an unintended compliment when they applied the name liberal to their own creed, historically the opposite of...