Tag Archives: Featured

Zinke’s new employer invests in fintech, blockchain, cyber security and energy projects. Former United States interior secretary Ryan Zinke has landed his first job since leaving the Trump administration two weeks ago. Zinke has joined investment company Artillery One as managing director, swissinfo.ch has learned. Zinke ended his nearly two-year stint as US Secretary of the Interior at the beginning of this year...

This exhaustion of the neocolonial-neofeudal model was inevitable, and as a result, so too is the decline and fall of the European integration/exploitation project. That a single currency, the euro, would fracture rather than unite Europe was understood long before the euro’s introduction as legal tender on January 1, 2002. The euro, the currency of 19 of the 28 member states of the European Union, is only one of the...

Swiss Franc The Euro has fallen by 0.33% at 1.1248 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, January 14(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: China’s exports and imports were weaker than expected, though the trade surplus swelled to its widest in a couple of years. The implications have undermined equities and weighed on risk appetites more broadly. Nearly all the...

For years, people blamed the global financial crisis on greed. Doesn’t this make you want to scream out, “what, were people not greedy in 2007 or 1997??” Greed utterly fails to explain the phenomenon. It merely serves to reinforce a previously-held belief. Far be it from us to challenge previously-held beliefs (OK, OK, we may engage in some sacred-ox-goring from time to time), but this is not a scientific approach to...

In recent weeks, the macro story focused on the shifting outlook for Fed policy and the Sino-American trade relationship. There is unlikely to be further progress on either issue in the week ahead. The Fed won’t raise interest rates until toward the middle of the year at the earliest. The government shutdown will limit new readings on the US economy. US and Chinese officials just met.  Mid-level Chinese officials can...

Rome and Brussels reached a compromise on the Italian government’s budget plans last month. But there are plenty of reasons for thinking this will be a challenging year for Italy. After battling for more than two months over a 2019 budget plan defiantly non-compliant with the EU fiscal rules, Rome and Brussels struck a last-minute agreement in December that avoided opening an Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP). To avoid...

© Byvalet | Dreamstime.com On 28 December 2018, Italy issued government bonds maturing in 2028 at an effective interest rate of 2.7%1. Interest rates like this combined with the scale of Italian public debt (157% of GDP) mean Italian taxpayers spend more on public debt interest than they do on education. In 2015, Italy spent 4.1% of GDP on public debt interest and only 2.8% of GDP on education. This week, Switzerland...

To get a good seat at the banquet of consequences, the owner of capital has to shift his/her capital into scarce forms for which there is demand. The Banquet of Consequences is being laid out, and so the question is: where will you be seated? The answer depends on two dynamics I’ve mentioned many times: what types of capital you own and the asymmetries of our economy. One set of asymmetries is the result of the system...

Next week’s vote on the divorce deal is likely to be defeated, and there is precious little time for an alternative before the Brexit deadline in March. The British parliamentary vote on Theresa May’s EU divorce deal will be on 15 January. The deal is likely to be rejected, as there has been little progress since December, when a first vote was called off for lack of support. The problem is that there remains no...

© Alexey Novikov | Dreamstime.com Volatile markets have been reshuffling the ranking of the world’s most valuable companies. Over the course of the last six months, Nestlé overtook Royal Dutch Shell to become Europe’s most valuable company. At the end of June 2018, Royal Dutch Shell had Europe’s highest market capitalisation (US$ 293 billion), making it the world’s 13th most valuable company, while Nestlé ranked 21st...