Tag Archives: Featured

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by 0.23% to 1.0788 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, June 9(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: The S&P 500 turning higher on the year was the last straw before an arguably overdue bout of profit-taking kicked-in and is the dominant feature today in the capital markets. It began slowly in the Asia Pacific region. Equities were mixed, and Australia’s 2.4% rally and the 1.6% gain...

© Denis Linine | Dreamstime.com Switzerland recently announced that it will lift existing entry restrictions with all EU and EFTA nations and the UK on 15 June 2020. In mid-May the Swiss government announced plans to fully reopen borders with France, Germany and Austria. On 2 June 2020, it decided to hold off on a full reopening of borders with Italy despite Italy’s decision to fully reopen its borders with Switzerland on 3 June 2020. However, on 5 June 2020, Federal...

The global crisis is not merely economic; it is the result of profound financial, sociological and political trends described by Marx, Kafka, Orwell and Huxley. The unfolding global crisis is best understood as the convergence of the dynamics described by Marx, Kafka, Orwell and Huxley. Let’s start with Franz Kafka, the writer (1883-1924) who most eloquently captured the systemic injustices of all-powerful bureaucratic institutions–the alienation experienced by the...

The NBER has made its formal declaration. Surprising no one, as usual this group of mainstream academic Economists wishes to tell us what we already know. At least this time their determination of recession is noticeably closer to the beginning of the actual event. The Great “Recession”, you might recall, wasn’t even classified as an “official” contraction until December 2008 – a full year after the NBER figured the thing had begun. Rather than becoming much...

Editor’s Note: We keep hearing from the Fed’s defenders that the current spate of new stimulus and bailouts from the central bank are really not a big deal and are all very prudent and moderate. I asked Senior Fellow Bob Murphy to provide some much needed perspective. Ryan McMaken: We’re in a very odd situation right now in terms of evaluating the state of the economy. We can see that there is rising unemployment, and there is likely to be a wave of missed mortgage...

It is a common belief that sound economics must be based on facts and not on theoretical reasoning as such. Some commentators are dismissive of economic analysis that is not derived from the true data, since it is not describing the facts of reality as depicted by historical data. The use of the free market economy framework, without the central bank and government intervention and with businesses as a foundation to derive valid conclusions, is dismissed as...

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by 0.28% to 1.0831 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, June 8(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: The MSCI Asia Pacific Index rose for a sixth consecutive session. Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Indonesian markets advanced more than 1%. European bourses are mixed, with the peripheral shares doing better than the core, leaving the Dow Jones Stoxx 600 about 0.5% lower near midday after...

Home office: more or less efficient? (© Keystone / Christian Beutler) Thanks to more focus and flexibility, productivity per worker increased by up to 16% during the Covid-19 lockdown in Switzerland, a study has calculated. The study by the Swiss Trade Association (SGV), reported in the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper, found that while hours worked dropped by 10% in the first quarter of 2020, GDP sank by just 2.6%. This translates to a productivity jump of up to 16%. And if...

The bill for extreme wealth/income inequality is now overdue, and the penalties for ignoring the bill will be as extreme as the inequality. Our socio-economic-political system–let’s call it the status quo–has been hollowed out by extremes of wealth/power inequality driven by financialization and globalization, which have enriched the top 5% and left everyone else behind. As a result, the status quo has become increasingly fragile and brittle even as cheerleaders...

In seeking to measure everything, econometricians gave us the dubious gift of gross national product and gross domestic product, the latter being in fashion today and the former in times past. Although there are different ways of measuring it, GDP is commonly taken as a measure of spending, comprised of household spending, government spending, investment spending, and net exports. The Bank of England’s guide says that it is a measure of the size and health of the...