Avenir Suisse

Alfred Escher’s bank is history. A toxic cocktail of private mismanagement, governmental knee-jerk reactions and shaken confidence has taken its toll. The history of scandals and mismanagement at Credit Suisse had long weighed heavily. According to reports, clients and major investors had been divesting themselves of the Swiss bank’s products and securities for months. Following the second and third largest bank failures in history in the US in March, the…

Recently, a discovery of so-called rare earths in Kiruna, Sweden, caused a great uproar in the media. Rare earths are a group of 17 elements that are often grouped together because they occur commonly and have similar properties. The EU Commission lists them as critical raw materials alongside metals like cobalt, lithium, and titanium. This means that they are of crucial economic importance, but cannot be reliably mined in the…