Tag Archive: Featured

Swiss Trade Balance Q2 2020: historic decline in exports and imports

Swiss foreign trade recorded a record decline in the second quarter of 2020. In seasonally adjusted terms, exports plunged by 11.5% compared to the previous quarter and imports even by 16.0%. This result stems from the traffic collapse recorded in April in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, with May and June having regained some color. The trade balance closed with a record surplus of 9.6 billion francs.

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Mandatory masks well accepted on Swiss public transport

Passengers on Swiss trams, buses, and trains have adapted well since a rule requiring face masks was introduced a fortnight ago. However, boat operating companies say they are losing business.

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Of Incomplete Plans and Recoveries

At the monthly press conference China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) now regularly gives whenever the Big Three economic accounts are updated (this time along with quarterly GDP), spokesman Liu Aihua was asked by a reporter from Reuters to comment on how the global economic recession might impact the Communist government’s long range goal of reaching its assigned GDP target.

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The Dangers Posed by State-Controlled Digital Currency

If we choose to break the state monopoly of money and allow private digital currencies to compete, a myriad of different solutions will emerge to serve a myriad of different needs.

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FX Daily, July 20: Markets Yawn, Deal or No Deal

Overview: While there are signs that Europe has reached a compromise on the grant/loan issue, the spillover into the markets is quite limited. China, with Shanghai's 3.1% gain, led a few markets in the Asia Pacific region higher, including Japan and India. Most markets were lower, and Europe's Dow Jones Stoxx 600 is a fractionally firmer, recovering from initial losses.

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Welcome to the Crazed, Frantic Demise of Finance Capitalism

The cognitive dissonance required to ignore the widening gap between the real economy and the fraud's basic machinery--speculation funded by "money" conjured out of thin air--has reached a level of denial that can only be termed psychotic.

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Gold Protects from Financial Crisis and Crashes Throughout History – Lucey and O’Connor

This is an interesting interview between Professor Brian Lucey and Dr. Fergal O’Connor, lecturer in finance and economics at University College Cork (UCC) on gold’s performance as a safe haven asset in the last 200 hundred years and in recent history including the 2008-2012 global financial crisis. 

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How Central Banks Destroy Money’s Purchasing Power

Without a monopolist central bank, market forces would restrain the issuance of bank notes. But once central banks monopolize money creation, wealth is systematically transferred to the central bank and the privileged few who are favored by the state.

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EM Preview for the Week Ahead

EM FX was mixed last week, with most risk assets continuing to fight a tug of war between improving economic data and worsening virus numbers. Sentiment may be hurt early this week over lack of consensus in the EU and the US regarding further fiscal stimulus. Three of the four EM central banks meeting this week are expected to cut rates.

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Embattled Swiss watch industry targets mainland China

The absence of tourists due to Covid-19 will have significant negative repercussions on the Swiss watch industry. In an attempt to make up for this loss of income, manufacturers are focusing their activities more on mainland China as well as easing off the bling.

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This Is a Financial Extinction Event

The lower reaches of the financial food chain are already dying, and every entity that depended on that layer is doomed. Though under pressure from climate change, the dinosaurs were still dominant 65 million year ago--until the meteor struck, creating a global "nuclear winter" that darkened the atmosphere for months, killing off most of the food chain that the dinosaurs depended on.

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NGOs warn conflict gold can reach Swiss refiners via Dubai

Swiss refiners — chief among them Valcambi — are under scrutiny due to the high risk of conflict gold originating in Africa entering their supply chain via the United Arab Emirates. Two parallel NGO reports on the subject were published on Thursday.

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A Rothbardian Analysis of the Constitutional Convention

Relates to Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty, Volume V: The New Republic, 1784-1791 and my forthcoming book, Liberty versus Power: A History of Cronyism in the United States, 1607-1849 (2021?)

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Biggest Swiss-based arms manufacturers revealed

Exporting arms is big business for Switzerland, but who are the actual manufacturers and exporters? After a five-year legal dispute, names can finally be published. Swiss companies exported CHF501 million ($530 million) in war materiel in the first half of 2020, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) said on Tuesday, almost twice as much as the same period in 2019.

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Swiss Solidarity raises CHF40 million for most vulnerable affected by Covid-19

The humanitarian charity Swiss Solidarity is helping over 100 groups to provide emergency assistance to the elderly, the homeless and other vulnerable people who have been struggling in Switzerland during the coronavirus pandemic.

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Transitory, The Other Way

After a record three straight months of decline for the seasonally-adjusted core CPI March through May 2020, it turned upward again in June. Buoyed by a partially reopened economy, the price discounting (prerequisite to the Big D) took at least one month off.

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The Death Wish of the Anarcho-Communists

[This article first appeared in the Libertarian Forum, January 1, 1970.] Now that the New Left has abandoned its earlier loose, flexible non-ideological stance, two ideologies have been adopted as guiding theoretical positions by New Leftists: Marxism-Stalinism, and anarcho-communism. Marxism-Stalinism has unfortunately conquered SDS, but anarcho-communism has attracted many leftists who are looking for a way out of the bureaucratic and statist...

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Krugman’s Keynesianism Has Made Him Wrong about Much More Than Economic Theory

Let me tell you about Keynesian economists. They are different from you and me. They learn their mathematical models and aggregate terminology early and easily, and it does something to them, makes them proud and self-omniscient where the rest of us are circumspect, in a way that, unless you were born a Keynesian economist, is very difficult to understand.

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FX Daily, July 17: Markets Limp into the Weekend

Chinese stocks stabilized after yesterday's sharp fall and most Asia Pacific equity markets, but Tokyo rose today.  European shares are little changed, but the Dow Jones Stoxx 600 is still poised to hold on to modest gains for the third consecutive week. 

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Report alleges targeting of Swiss-based Catalan separatist’s phone

The telephone of Anna Gabriel, a leading figure of the separatist movement in Catalonia who has sought refuge in Geneva, has been reportedly targeted by a “possible case of domestic political espionage”, according to a news investigation.

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