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The Antipodeans and the Scandis led last week's move against the dollar, registering more than 1% gains.  The yen was the weakest of the major currencies, falling almost 1.75%, its worst week since March 2020.  The JP Morgan Emerging Market Currency Index initially declined to a new low for the year before recovering to snap a five-week slide and gain nearly 0.45%. Despite the six basis point gain ahead of the weekend, perhaps helped by a stronger-than-expected...

The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was a comprehensive effort by Mao Zedong to regulate how people think and behave. Citizens were forced to read the “Red Bible” and honor the Communist Party with quasi-religious rituals. Mutual supervision was encouraged throughout all of society. People were told that the way of thinking and behavior advocated by Mao Zedong was the only correct one. Sixty years later, China is undergoing another Cultural Revolution, the goal...

Swiss private banks increased their assets under management to almost CHF3 trillion last year © Keystone / Gaetan Bally Swiss private banks managed to increase their assets under management to CHF2.9 trillion ($3.15 trillion) last year, an increase of 2.8% on 2019. “The year 2020 was dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic, yet the Swiss private banking sector still got off relatively lightly compared to other industries,” consultancy firm PwC said in its Private Banking...

Why do individuals desire to have money, which cannot be consumed and produces nothing? To provide an answer to this one must go back in time to establish how money emerged. Original Article: “Why Does Money Have Value? Not Because the Government Says It Does.“. Why does the dollar bill in our pockets have value? According to some commentators, money has value because the government in power says so. For other commentators the value of money is on account of...

Under an extreme scenario, Switzerland’s electricity supply could be interrupted for up to 500 hours © Keystone / Gaetan Bally If progress is not made on an electricity agreement with the European Union, at least at a technical level, Switzerland is likely to face a significant problem guaranteeing electricity in the short and medium term, especially in winter. This is the conclusion of an external report on supply security, presented to the government on Wednesday....

© Shutter999 | Dreamstime.com Geo-blocking is the practice of pushing online shoppers to a version of a website based on their geographic location. Many consumers would like to see the practice made illegal and Swiss laws look set to make it so, according to the NZZ am Sonntag, reported Le Matin. Geo-blocking and filtering is particularly pernicious in a place like Switzerland where prices are generally much higher than the rest of Europe. There are broadly two kinds...

That the neofeudal lords and their lackeys offer the debt-serfs “choices” of forced labor would be comic if the results weren’t so tragic. We know we’re close to the moment when Everything Solid Melts into Air when extraordinary breakdowns are treated as ordinary and the “news” quickly reverts to gossip. So over 4 million American workers up and quit every month, month after month after month, and the reaction is ho-hum, labor shortage, blah, blah, blah, toy...

The bank is situated at Zurich’s prestigious Bahnhofstrasse. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally Quintet Private Bank says it is closing its Swiss arm just 16 months after opening. The Qatari-owned private bank took over Bank am Bellevue last year. The Luxembourg-based private bank is closing its Swiss business, which employs 87 people, according to a statement on Tuesday. It is unclear whether the closure will happen via a wind-down or sale. The private bank, which opened in...

The Berlin “housing crisis” has, of course, many causes. But most, if not all of them, are government made. Unfortunately, however, people blame “capitalists” for their plight. Original Article: “Berliners in 2021 Want to Expropriate Private Housing” On September 6, 2021, the city-state of Berlin, Germany’s capital, held a referendum: voters in Berlin had to decide whether thousands of housing units owned by “large real estate firms” should be nationalized. 56.4...

Warum Geld seinen Wert nicht vom Staat erhält Warum hat der Geldschein in unserer Tasche einen Wert? Einigen Kommentatoren zufolge hat Geld einen Wert, weil die Regierung, die an der Macht ist, dies sagt. Für andere ist der Wert des Geldes auf die gesellschaftliche Konvention zurückzuführen. Dies bedeutet, dass Geld einen Wert hat, weil es akzeptiert wird, und warum wird es akzeptiert? … weil es akzeptiert wird! Offensichtlich ist dies keine gute Erklärung dafür,...