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Your marginal tax rate is an important metric. But it is also a complex and misunderstood concept. Many beliefs about the marginal tax rates are wrong. So, in this article, I want to clear out as much as possible regarding the subject. By the end, you will know how to estimate your marginal tax rate and what it means. Marginal Tax Rate Let’s start at the beginning: what is a marginal tax rate? Your marginal tax rate is the rate at which new income is taxed. It is...

The recent GameStop short-squeeze drama has riveted financial markets. Given the historic unpopularity of short sellers (e.g., Holman Jenkins has written that “short-selling is…widely unpopular with everyone who has a stake in seeing stock prices go up”), the resulting heightened invective against them is not a surprise. Unfortunately, an intensification of this rhetoric could lead to unwarranted broader restrictions on short selling, indicated by the politicians...

The price of silver is going up and down like a yo-yo. On Sunday and into the first part of Monday, the price skyrocketed on news that Reddit was touting the metal. But as the data clearly showed, the price was not driven up by retail buying of physical metal. To be sure, there was retail buying. But even if they depleted the finite inventories of Eagles and Maples, they were not the buyers that pushed the price up to $30. That would be the futures speculators....

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.05% to 1.0809 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, February 3(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: Equities have charged higher, and the greenback is mostly firmer. News that Draghi may become Italy’s next Prime Minister has boosted Italian bonds. The PBOC unexpectedly drained liquidity, and this may have deterred buying of Chinese stocks, a notable exception in the regional rally....

Sometimes you can count on the manipulation conspiracy theorists to get it exactly wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, nor halfway wrong. Not even mostly wrong. Totally wrong, backwards. Michael Crichton, in talking about the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect said this: “You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s [Gell-Mann] case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.15% to 1.082 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, February 1(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: Global equities are snapping back today, while the greenback retained the strength seen last week that was attributed to safe-haven flows. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index snapped a four-day decline led by Hong Kong, South Korea, India, and Indonesia. Europe’s Dow Jones Stoxx is up around...

British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, at a farm in Wales in 2019, where he was canvassing support for his post-Brexit farming policy. Afp Or Licensors Britain argues that Brexit will make British agriculture greener. SWI Swissinfo.ch looks at how successful EU agricultural policies have been, and how they compare with Switzerland’s approach. One of the arguments Brexiters pushed forward was that the United Kingdom would be greener after Brexit. They argued hefty...

Zurich, 1 February 2021 – UBS has successfully completed the pilot phase of its new multibanking function and is now gradually rolling out the offering across Switzerland. UBS Multibanking will now also give SMEs full transparency over all their accounts and allow them to execute payments debited from accounts with third-party banks directly in UBS E-Banking. UBS is the first and so far the only Swiss bank to offer such a comprehensive payment function. Andy...

01.02.2021 – Retail trade turnover adjusted for sales days and holidays showed nominal growth of 3.5% in December 2020 compared with the same month of the previous year. Seasonally adjusted, nominal turnover grew by 2.2% compared with the previous month. Despite the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the whole of 2020, provisional results show nominal growth of 0.1%. This positive growth consists of contrasting developments in the sectors with some strong turnover...

Our Nobility’s assessment of risk and their war-gaming of vulnerabilities are fatally deficient.Many people have heard of Nassim Taleb’s black swan but fewer understand how few events qualify as black swans. Per Wikipedia, a black swan is an unpredictable or unforeseen event, typically one with extreme consequences, an event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their...