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So party on, because “the worst year ever” is ending and the rebound of financial markets, already the greatest in recorded history, will only become more fabulous. Of the lavish banquet of absurdities laid out in 2020, one of the most delectable is Time magazine’s December 14 cover declaring that 2020 was the “worst year ever.” You’re joking, right? In history’s immense tapestry of human misery, it’s not even in the top 100 worst years. Consider 1177 B.C., when...

The term environmental social governance (ESG) investing is relatively new. As described in Forbes, [An] approach that is slowly on the rise is ESG activism, where an activist fund will take a position in the security of a company with the aim of campaigning to make its business better in terms of governance, less environmentally unfriendly and more socially responsible. But the concept of morally selective investing is not totally new, as it gained a good deal of...

21. Dezember 2020 – von Michael Rectenwald [Dies ist die Abschrift des gleichnamigen Vortrags, der auf dem Ron Paul Symposium des Mises Institute am 7. November 2020 in Angleton, Texas, gehalten wurde.] “Sei nicht böse” ist zwar nicht mehr länger Google’s offizielles Unternehmensmotto, aber es verbleibt Bestandteil des letzten Satzes in seinem Verhaltenskodex. Unter ‘nichts Böses machen’ versteht Google nach wie vor, dass «alles [was es tut] in Verbindung mit...

Twenty-twenty marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of a book that has had an expanding influence on the public conversation about market competition. Robert Frank and Philip Cook’s 1995 The Winner-Take-All Society argued that there are an increasing number of markets in which small differences in performance give rise to enormous differences in rewards. As John Kenneth Galbraith described it in a review of that book, the consequence is that “the one who wins gets it...

This is happening a lot in Switzerland. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally Even good drivers might struggle to fit their cars into the allotted parking spaces in Switzerland. Yet Swiss cities don’t necessarily want to provide larger spaces. The Swiss Association of Road and Traffic Experts has presented a proposal to increase the standard size of parking spaces. Currently, the Swiss standard width is 2.35 metres for private parking spaces and 2.50m for public ones. The new...

With the development of the Austrian Business Paradigm and the Austrian Business Model, and tools such as the “Value Learning Process,” businesses of all kinds can utilize the deep insights of Austrian economics to further enhance how they facilitate value for their customers. John Boles — an avid listener of the Economics for Entrepreneurs Podcast — provides an example of how he applies these insights at his accounting firm. Here is a summary resource and a...

I joined Ben Lichtenstein, host of the morning futures program at TDAmeritrade.  It is in the futures market that I began my career, and where I gained respect for local traders, who do not have a large institutional backing such as a bank or hedge fund, and are trading their own capital, and taking the risk often from those institutional participants.  There is truly a David vs. Goliath drama being played out with asymmetries of information and depth of capital...

A police officer in the Swiss resort of Villars-sur-Ollon checks whether Covid-19 measures are being observed. Keystone / Valentin Flauraud Gérard Brudi, who rents two apartments to winter workers in the popular French ski resort of Val Thorens, has not had a single booking this year. Despite snow falling and sunny weather, the ski lifts are closed. The travel reps that would normally host guests have little more to do than check empty chalets for freezing pipes. Val...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The New York Times managed to find some young people whose silver spoons provide a sour taste in their mouths. To hear them talk, their good fortune is making them sick. 

In 2019, we wrote about how corporate share repurchases, or “stock buybacks,” had accounted for nearly all buying in the market. A year later, that significant support for asset prices has reversed. While markets have certainly been on a tear this year, due to massive amounts of Federal Stimulus, it has been an advance solely on valuation expansion. While the decline in 2020 earnings was no surprise given the pandemic, earnings were already declining in 2019. The...