In that case he’s the most tabloid award-winning journalist in this country.
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No - still making regular monthly investments. Though just (though at just a fraction of what I disposed of in VIAC).
Also, I actually bought a few selected individual stocks - but just for a fraction of that VIAC account.
I think I know which divorce you are speaking of.
If you’re up in the upper management of a major bank, why not investigate the details/background a bit. Divorce sometimes uncovers relationships with secretaries, which is a no-go these days, and other unprofessional behaviour.
I also feel Lukas played a big part in bringing down Pierin Vincenz and the Raiffeisen mafia (lot of shady insider dealings over many years). Such dealings hurt us as small investors.
I think he’s ok.
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Did not upload the video because of Lukas Hässig at all. But because of Klaus Wellershoff who was Chief Economist with SBC and later UBS for many years. Nobody bothering here that he assumes for Switzerland:
- having a double digit GDP loss
- having a double digit number of unemployed
- seeing a upcoming recession that no person alive had seen before
He is talking about Switzerland and not for the rest of the world, who probably might be worse.
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But he’s saying that every week of lockdown costs 1.5% of annual GDP. 52 weeks in a year, so in a normal week we produce 2% of annual GDP. Am I supposed to believe that we run at 25% capacity?
But the interview touches on some important points and shows just how little we know and understand the whole situation. Like, all this glorified help, who pays for it, where does the money REALLY come from. I liked the notion that today’s debt is going to be paid by future taxes. Every budget deficit is like you taking a loan that your kid will have to pay off. How is that moral?
In USA unemployed people are getting paid $600 per week for doing nothing. If we don’t see huge inflation sooner or later, when the economy opens up, then I really don’t get how it all works.
This might happen, but they really didn’t give reasons as to why this should happen. It’s not like there is a war, some crucial resource is missing, millions have died, infrastructure has collapsed. It’s just that people stopped working and consuming for a few months. If they all get back to work then why can’t it all be like it was? What speaks against a quick recovery?
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Well, ask where will you or your friends go to holidays this year? To the beaches in Spain, Italy or Greece, when you have wife and kids? Many people don’t know and plan maybe for later this year to go somewhere. Here the impact of countries who are counting on tourism. Currently all is out of balance and at least for this year. And this is in addition to Covid19 with some restriction still being in place for many months.
Greece 20,6%
Portugal 19%
Austria 15,5%
Spain 14,6%
Italy 13%
China 11%
France 10%
Germany 7,5%
USA 6% (most visited city > New York)
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That’s why I found it funny when I saw some graffitis in Barcelona saying “Tourists go home, Refugees welcome” and find the current situation ironic. I heard in Venice they are “begging” tourists to come back.
But on a global scale of things, answer me this: what if, from this day on, people stopped going on lavish holidays, and cut back on other forms of entertainment. And this would go on for years. And mind you, I’m only asking theoretically, and don’t want to digress on mental health etc. Just purely from the resource/capital-oriented point of view.
What would happen if we cut back on entertainment and focused on work. Do you think the World would come crashing down? I mean sure, millions who live off entertainment would have to look for other jobs, probably struggling for a long time before being able to find something. The GDP as a nominal figure would drop, but GDP is a retarded measure anyway. If I pay you $1’000’000 license fee, then it somehow contributes to GDP, but if your wife cooks you a meal, it does not!
I would argue that this ascetic lifestyle should in fact NOT slow down our technological development. All entertainment is just a waste of resources. We always balance between current and future consumption. Postponing consumption is the definition of investing. The more we invest, the better off we will be in the future.
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+10’000.
And this is not even a thought experiment: we already saw what happens when the citizens of a nation are structurally forced to save 40% of their income.
In 40 years, Singapore went from fields of swamps (when British forces retired at the end of the sixties, Australia considered that Singapore was finished) to one of the countries with the highest quality of life. If there is one example of how capital allocation drives what happens to a country’s destiny, you could not find a better example.
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Not spending time on entertainment doesn’t mean that it will be spent on working, especially for unemployed people. Spending more time on working and less on entertainment would mean more people with mental problems, burnouts etc. ;).
They don’t have to. I didn’t claim that our productivity will increase, just that it will not drop. But actually, if you don’t spend time driving your car around pointlessly, gas will be cheaper for other, more productive reasons. So yes, even by not spending time on entertainment you contribute.
I made a disclaimer to avoid such responses:
Of course it’s more complicated than this. That’s why many economic models are valid with a “ceteris paribus” disclaimer (all other things being equal).
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If people don’t spend money, there’s no salary for people employed to provide those goods or services (which means they won’t be able to buy goods and services either, etc.). The economy kinda runs as a self sustaining cycle, if there’s no demand or offer, or both, things go bad, most people assume it’s a temporary state we’re in, if it isn’t then who knows where we end up.
And even if the argument is that only some sector will shrink, that’s still a massive shift, it can take a long time before things are stabilized (e.g. having 50% of the restaurant/bars/tourism workers retrain, find a job, you also need to have demand for those workers, so somehow have other industries/sectors have enough demand to absorb it, not going to happen overnight, or even in a few years).
State debt doesn’t really work like household debt though. You don’t really have to pay it off, what matters is how much it costs (it has never been cheaper), also the hypothetical counterfactual matters (is the country/economy better off without the extra money spent, over a longer period of time? bad economy means less tax revenue)
Yes, the economy is an interconnected system. If people working in entertainment have no money, then it can take a long time before they find another job. But I already wrote that. When people have lower income, they will reduce spending on less essential things first. Like, if they spend huge money on football subscription and tickets, and best footballers are paid millions to attract these people, then this is the business that will come crashing down in a crisis like we have now. And yes, people who work in this entertainment business also spend their earning in other branches. But it does not change the fact that their work does not contribute to the technological development.
If your country sells bonds denominated in USD that are being bought abroad, then of course it works like this. And if it issues the bonds in local currency which are bought by local investors, then they will have to be repaid. And yes, maybe they will be repaid with “spreadsheet generated” money, but this causes inflation, which is a hidden tax on everybody.
If you have constant supply, and suddenly citizen A has nothing to eat, then you will have to ask citizen B to reduce his consumption, so that it can go to citizen A. For this, citizen B will be rewarded with higher consumption in the future. And this future consumption will have to be taken from somewhere. Tell me, where do I see it wrong?
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Is technological improvement the main goal? Once everything is automated we switch to UBI? 
I thought the reason this might not be true, is that the non technological side is what motivates a lot of people, tourism, culture, arts, experiences. And productivity improvements let people spend more time and money on those things they find more fulfilling than work. What do we replace e.g. restaurants or bar with in this world, VR experiences with interactions with AIs?
Should I substitute food with money? (money doesn’t usually behave like goods so the analogy is a bit confusing).
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It is a worthy goal to pursue, and of course you will need to balance between work and fun to achieve it. I don’t even want to argue about it, because it seems too obvious.
Sorry, I don’t follow.
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I didn’t understand what you wrote, what is supply? Money supply? Food supply? (Sorry maybe it’s just using eat/consumption that makes it confusing).
Food supply, or the supply of goods and services.
Generally, both sides are right - short-term adaptation will be a disaster just due to size of entertainment/tourism/restaurants sector in the economy. Long-term though this adaptation (most likely) will increase investment and capital accumulation, and thus increase the productivity and in effect quality of life (it will actually make everything better, entertainment/tourism/restaurants ironically too). If there’s less money spend on entertainment/consumption now, then it means more resources are allocated to investments (including innovative startups).
One of the problems that I see is that modern inflation-regulation-redistribution dependent economy is very fragile (in the Nassim Taleb sense). It’s easy to break things beyond repair and making it more robust is not a popular political option in modern democracies. So, I’m just hopping that this short-term adaption will be more-or-less smooth and won’t cause some two or three decades of broken economy and degradation of the fabric of society.
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Have you heard about alternative cost? Every dollar that government spends (usually wastes) is a dollar not spend by a consumer or business (borrowed or not). Government is not a perpetuum mobile to increase wealth by borrowing and redistribution - there’re many costs to this machine, some are obvious like the tax money transferred from your salary to pay off interest on “public” debt; some are less obvious, like the government outbidding rest of the market in the competition for scare resources (like investors’ money).
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I don’t know, maybe I’m old-fashioned or something, but I consider unprofessional writing publicly about your divorce situation against your will. My previous boss was a good manager and I don’t care if he had an affair or not. I’m not sure why others should care. In any case, certainly, I’d not want to be an object of Internet tabloid articles in such situation.
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