Tag Archives: newsletter

05.07.2022 – In 2021, for the second consecutive year, the activity of medical practices was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite an improved situation compared with 2020, two out of five medical practices experienced reduced activity and one in five had to resort to short-time work. Three out of five primary care practices participated in the vaccination campaign that began at the end of 2020. These are some of the results from the latest survey of structural...

Part II of II, by Claudio Grass, Hünenberg, Switzerland An astonishing acceleration Even though the downhill trajectory we saw over the last decades in terms of property rights was bad enough, nothing could have ever prepared us for what the covid crisis would bring. Even those of us who have read enough history to know that there’s really no line that the State will not cross in its fervent pursuit of absolute power were sincerely surprised; how could it be that...

04.07.2022 – Vehicle leases and arrears are the most common types of debt in Switzerland. In 2020, 15.5% of the population lived in a household with at least one vehicle lease and 14.9% in a household with at least one arrear in the past 12 months. 6.9% lived in a household with at least three different types of debt. These are some of the findings from the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) conducted by the Federal Statistical Office (FSO). The results...

In his June 21 New York Times article “Is the Era of Cheap Money Over?,” Paul Krugman argues against the view that the Fed has kept interest rates artificially low for the past ten to twenty years. Other commentators have argued that these low interest rates have inflated bubbles everywhere as investors desperately look for something that will yield a decent rate of return. Krugman expresses strong disagreement that the decline in interest rates caused bubbles and...

[Der folgende Beitrag wurde Mitte Mai 2022 als Vortrag auf der Gottfried Haberler Konferenz in Liechtenstein gehalten.] Gleich zu Beginn möchte ich Ihnen die Schlussfolgerungen meiner Überlegungen mitteilen: Das Bargeld zurückzudrängen oder aus dem Verkehr zu ziehen und digitales Zentralbankgeld auszugeben, sind äußerst problematisch, weil (1.) die Missbrauchsmöglichkeiten und Fehlentwicklungen des staatlichen Fiat-Geldmonopols gewaltig erhöht werden, ohne dass...

Pick one, America: national security of the essential material foundation of everything, the industrial base, or “global markets,” maximizing greed / corporate profits. Sorry about the clickbait title. We all know there isn’t “one solution” to anything as complex as a socio-economic-cultural-political system. But this is based on looking at all the problems from one very shaky perspective: that the foundations of any solutions are rock-solid and all we need to do is...

In Switzerland, it is possible to pay delinquent debts with large sums of cash. Some criminals are using the loophole to launder money, reports Le Matin. Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.com Swiss broadcaster SRF investigated several official debt enforcement offices across Switzerland and found that large sums of cash were passing through some of them. In Geneva, CHF 24 million of cash passed through its cantonal offices des poursuites in 2021, some of it dirty,...

Overview: The dollar is soaring today, and the euro is trading at new 22-year lows having traded below $1.03. Even a 50 bp hike by the Reserve Bank of Australia has failed to prevent a sharp drop in the Australian dollar. The session seemed to have begun off well enough. Japan, South Korean, Taiwan, Australian, and Indian shares advanced in the Asia Pacific region. Europe’s Stoxx 600 began off firmly, but quickly unwound yesterday’s 0.55% gain. US futures are...

Die Kurse habe sich zwar stabilisiert, sind jedoch im gesamten Markt weit von ihren Höchstständen entfernt. Alle größeren Cryptocoins verloren deutlich an Wert, darunter auch Bitcoin und Ethereum. Interessant wird es jedoch, wenn wir den relativen Wert der beiden Cryptocoins miteinander vergleichen. Bitcoin News: Bitcoin Miner verdienen wieder mehr als Ethereum MinerBis Mitte Juni ging es für den Bitcoin-Preis im Vergleich zu Ethereum runter, doch in den letzten drei...

04.07.2022 – The consumer price index (CPI) increased by 0.5% in June 2022 compared with the previous month, reaching 104.5 points (December 2020 = 100). Inflation was +3.4% compared with the same month of the previous year. These are the results of the Federal Statistical Office (FSO). The 0.5% increase compared with the previous month is due to several factors including rising prices for fuel. Heating oil also recorded a price increase, as did fruiting vegetables....