Tag Archives: newsletter

The US dollar enjoyed a firmer bias last week despite the disappointing jobs growth reported on September 3.  The Norwegian krone was the only major currency that gained against the greenback.  Brent was less than a quarter of a dollar firmer, so the likelihood of the central bank raising rates later this month offers a more compelling explanation.  The Australian dollar was the weakest, even though the Reserve Bank of Australia signaled it would proceed with plans...

The Swiss property market continues to heat up during the pandemic. Keystone / Christof Schuerpf The risk of a housing bubble has increased in the last three months, but the Swiss National Bank (SNB) is unconcerned about a general inflationary threat. In an interview with the SonntagsZeitung newspaper on Sunday, SNB vice-chairman Fritz Zurbrügg said that housing market had heated further since June. “We cannot sit back and relax,” he said. “But we have also always...

The financialized American economy and State are now totally dependent on a steady flow of lies and propaganda for their very survival. Were the truth told, the status quo would collapse in a putrid heap.Go ahead and be evil, because everyone else is evil, too, because being evil serves everyone’s interests far better than maintaining integrity, for integrity will cost you more than you can afford. In other words, lying, fraud, embezzlement, misrepresentation of...

Our healthcare system is broken, a fact nobody would have disputed in precovid days. Regulatory capture is a reality, and the pharmaceutical industry is fraught with examples. Yet we trusted private-public partnerships to find an optimal solution to a global pandemic, assuming a crisis would bring out the best in historically corrupt institutions. Here is a brief list of less-than-savory behavior demonstrated by our titans of healthcare:  Pfizer and Johnson &...

The voluntary site allowed people to register their vaccinations online, but the probe found their data was not secure. Keystone / Gaetan Bally A federal investigator has found “serious” technical failures at voluntary vaccination registry mesvaccins.ch, which was closed in May following data security concerns. “The technical failures were indeed very serious, affecting all services of the platform,” Federal Data Protection Commissioner Adrian Lobsiger told Swiss...

While bankruptcy has a negative connotation in the business world, “Bankruptcy fulfills the crucially important social function of preserving the available stock of capital.” Original Article: “Preserving Capital through Bankruptcy” The New York Times recently published a piece entitled “When Kmart Moved Out, Churches and Flea Markets Moved In.” The article, penned by Kevin Williams, provides an instructive subtitle: “The retailer’s former stores are being used...

SIX group has backed its new DLT exchange to enhance the way stocks and bonds are traded worldwide. © Keystone / Ennio Leanza A new Swiss stock exchange has been awarded a license to trade digital assets using distributed ledger technology (DLT). On Friday, the SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) was given the go-ahead by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) to operate as a stock exchange and central securities depositoryExternal link. The licensing...

Could Texas usher in a uniquely decentralized approach to immigration? Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently embarked on a unique policy drive to have the state government lead the charge on immigration policy. It’s no secret that talks of immigration evoke powerful emotions on both sides — another indication of the elevated levels of polarization present in the US. As I’ve previously mentioned, the present level of friction in Washington DC has effectively prevented...

The Orca plant in Climeworks, Iceland, intends to extract 4,000 tonnes of CO2 per year from the air. Climeworks The Swiss company Climeworks has just opened in Iceland the world’s largest plant for the capture and permanent storage of carbon dioxide from the air. This technology is deemed essential for combating global warming, yet it raises some questions. What if, after decades of steady rise, global greenhouse gas emissions finally started to drop? Such is the...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Because my economics courses focus on public policy, I often deal with benefit-cost analyses (BCA) in them. While little discussed, the central idea is simply to identify and include all the relevant benefits and costs of a decision, do our best to estimate their values, then choose the option that provides the greatest net benefits. Hardly a radical idea. It can be useful in disciplining our thinking to be more consistent. Benjamin Franklin employed a...