Tag Archives: Featured

In my days before I worked for the Mises Institute, I had a colleague who knew I associated with Austrian-School economists. In the wake of the bailouts and quantitative easing that followed the 2008 financial crisis, he’d sometimes crack “where’s all that inflation you Austrians keep talking about?” But then, in the very same conversation, he’d remark with dismay on how much housing-price increases had outpaced household income in the region. He didn’t need an...

The risks of a hard Brexit are perhaps higher than markets appreciated. Here, we set forth some possible scenarios as to what may unfold after the January 31 deadline. Uncertainty is likely to be protracted and markets hate uncertainty. As such, we see UK assets continuing to underperform. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS Fears of a hard Brexit are still alive and well.  Prime Minister Johnson is pushing to guarantee a Brexit by end-2020 even if a new trade arrangement is not in...

By Daniel R. Amerman, CFA As can be seen in the graph above, for the last 12 weeks there has been a stunning visual correlation between the yellow bars of the total weekly funding of deficits by the Federal Reserve, and the green bars of the weekly deficit spending by the United States government. Total deficit spending, the extent to which monies spent by the federal government exceeded taxes collected, was a staggering $422 billion in just the last 12 weeks. In...

Dear Mr. Taft: I eagerly read your piece Warriors for Opportunity on Wednesday, as I often do about pieces that argue that capitalism is not working today. You begin by saying: “Financial capitalism – free markets powered by a robust financial system – is the dominant economic model in the world today. Yet many who have benefited from the system agree it’s not working the way it ought to.” Leaving aside that our financial system is not robust—the interest rate is...

Major European stocks post modest losses on Wednesday. US Dollar Index clings to gains above 97.30. Coming up: Swiss National Bank’s (SNB) Quarterly Bulletin. The USD/CHF pair dropped to its lowest level since late August at 0.9798 on Wednesday but staged a technical recovery in the last hour. As of writing, the pair was up 0.05% on the day at 0.9808. After major Asian equity indexes closed the day in the negative territory on Wednesday, European stocks struggled to...

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by 0.22% to 1.0905 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, December 18(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: The capital markets have turned quiet as the year-end positioning drives prices in lieu of fresh developments. Equities in the Asia Pacific region were narrowly mixed. The smaller markets in Asia performed better than the large bourses of Japan, China, and Korea, which eased....

According to the plans, the cablecar would have 18 cabins, each able to carry 34 people between the Mythenquai beach on one side of the lake to the Zurichhorn park on the other. (Keystone) A Zurich court has rejected plans for a cablecar link crossing over Lake Zurich, stating that the project, known as ‘Zuribahn’, did not have sufficient local support. The court annulled construction plans for the city cablecar, which had been presented by Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB)...

VW was caught using illegal software to cheat pollution tests in 2015, triggering a global backlash against diesel and numerous court cases around the world that have so far cost the German company €30 billion euros ($33 billion). (Keystone / Julian Stratenschulte) A Zurich commercial court has dismissed claims for damages by a consumer group against the German car firm Volkswagen and Swiss importer Amag, linked to the “Dieselgate” emissions-rigging scandal. In a...

The Chinese government was serious about imposing pollution controls on its vast stock of automobiles. The largest market in the world for cars and trucks, the net result of China’s “miracle” years of eurodollar-financed modernization, for the Chinese people living in its huge cities the non-economic costs are, unlike the air, immediately clear each and every day. A new set of relatively strict pollution controls was added in the second half of this year. As is...

In the early 1920s, Ludwig von Mises became a witness to hyperinflation in Austria and Germany — monetary developments that caused irreparable and (in the German case) cataclysmic damage to civilization. Mises’s policy advice was instrumental in helping to stop hyperinflation in Austria in 1922. In his Memoirs, however, he expressed the view that his instruction — halting the printing press — was heeded too late: Austria’s currency did not collapse — as did Germany’s...