From John Cochrane's substack, October 13:
I’m just home from Switzerland, where I gave the Karl Brunner Lecture. It is always eye opening to travel and see how other countries do things, and leads me to question basic assumptions.
Swiss inflation barely exceeded 3% in the post-pandemic surge, and is back to zero. Interest rates are also back to zero.
The SNB balance sheet is huge, at 854 billion CHF, coincidentally exactly the same as GDP. Imagine the Fed had a $30 Trillion balance sheet, not “merely” the $6.5 trillion that people complain about.
You might think Switzerland is on the vanguard of a return to zero bound, zero rates, secular stagnation, immense quantitative easing. You would be wrong....
....MUCH MORE
