Tag Archives: newsletter

We are hearing rumors this week of a shortage of the big silver bars, the thousand-ouncers. No, we don’t refer to bullion banks saying this. Nor big dealers, who are happy to sell us as many of these as we can buy. Nor our peeps in high places (we don’t claim to have any such peeps). We refer to the usual suspects. We talk about abundance and scarcity of the metals in nearly every one of these reports, in terms of the spread between spot and futures prices. Some...

The coronavirus pandemic has made people more conservative with their voting. Keystone / Peter Klaunzer The battle over the responsible business initiative is now over. The way the campaign was managed and how the issue was eventually decided says a lot about Switzerland. On November 29, 50.7% of Swiss voters backed an initiative to extend liability over international human rights abuses and environmental harm caused by major Swiss companies and the firms they...

By Edward Girardet For a nation that prides itself on being on the global forefront of new technologies and science, particularly health care, Switzerland has an astoundingly poor record for dealing with Covid-19. The Lake Geneva region, which borders locked-down France, ranks as one of the worst coronavirus hotspots in Europe. Many Swiss, too, act as if there is no pandemic by crowding into shopping malls or socialising without masks. And in an astounding Orwellian...

One sure way to identify a system “optimized for failure” is if all the insiders are absolutely confident the system is “optimized for my success”. I often discuss optimization here because it offers an insightful window into how systems become fragile and break down. When we optimize something, we’re aiming to get the most bang for our buck: maximize our efficiency, profit, productivity, etc., while minimizing our costs. To maximize our goal, whatever it is–profits,...

The Hermitage fraud became an international cause célèbre after the death in custody of Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. Keystone High-profile Kremlin critic and investor Bill Browder has threatened Credit Suisse and UBS with legal action for breaching US sanctions if they unfreeze accounts belonging to three Russian clients accused of a huge tax fraud against his investment company. The two Swiss banks hold assets worth more than $24 million (CHF21.8 million),...

Are foreigners selling Treasury bills? If they are, this would seem to merit consideration for the reflation argument. After all, the paramount monetary deficiency exposed by March’s GFC2 (and the Fed’s blatant role in making it worse) was the dangerous degree of shortage over the best collateral. Best collateral means OTR, and for standard practice this had always meant Treasury bills (as well as, noted yesterday, bonds and notes just auctioned off). According to...

“Small business” is just a government classification. Entrepreneurial businesses serving well-defined communities via creative specialization exhibit enormous economic productivity, energy and dynamism. Such businesses can not be defined quantitatively as small, medium or large. They’re defined by their qualitative impact on their customers’ lives. Entrepreneurial businesses care differently, and care more. Big businesses must pay attention to size and scale, to...

The online purchase of a second-hand luxury watch is becoming ever more popular. Andrew Poplavsky The market for second-hand luxury watches is booming. But for the average consumer, it is not easy to tell a fake from the genuine article and determine the real value of a particular timepiece. Certificates based on blockchain technology could provide more transparency. Watch fans who want to get the new diving watch by Rolex had better be patient. The official...

From tip-top transport in Basel to housing headaches in Geneva, foreign residents share what they love and loathe about the four Swiss cities featured in the Expat City Ranking 2020. Of the 66 cities in the latest list, published by InterNations on Thursday, Basel rates highest (24th), ahead of Lausanne (28th), Zurich (37th) and Geneva (48th). The Expat City Ranking 2020 The Expat City Ranking is based on the annual Expat Insider survey by InterNations, a global...

Twenty years ago, in November 2000, the Treasury Department changed one aspect of the way the government would sell its own debt. Auctions of these and other kinds of securities had been ongoing for decades, back to the twenties, and they had been transformed many times along the way. In the middle of the 1970’s Great Inflation, for example, Treasury gradually phased out all other means for issuing securities, by 1977 relying exclusively on auctions as the sole...