Are you still talking about Greece or some other country?
tbh it’s the same story elsewhere. I still remember the story about a eastern country where you have to bribe the nurse in the hospital to have a pillow.
Still about Greece 
In the public hospitals it’s like a bazaar, there’s flyers for anything, renting TVs, chairs, private nurses - and of course the whole rotten chain of command gets a piece of the action, I mean they “made it” to the public sector, might as well get something out of it, right? If people tolerate this then they are part of it.
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I have a strange feeling that Greece will be the future of many western european countries, France, Germany, Austria etc. are all living over it´s standard, spending the generated wealth of past generations.
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Have you been to Greece? I mean it’s lovely with lovely people, but there seem to be more cars than people.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/largest-sovereign-debt-defaults-in-modern-history/
Do you still consider Japan to be an example of bad market development?
Dear mod, I can write a lot more about it but then we’ll go full on into politics.
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Sorry, I thought I will share some info fitting to this topic.
No, let’s stick with facts and numbers 
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Thanks for sharing. I find it interesting but it also have some tragic elements. It exposes the obsession sometimes people can get into while feeling the euphoria of investment success and attributing it to their talent rather than their luck.
I know some folks who get so obsessed with investing and returns that they forget why are they investing in first place. There is no fun to be on the top of Kilimanjaro if you are alone and no one is there to celebrate with you.
Relationships, mental health, mental peace and happiness are more valuable and should always remain the main goal of any journey .
Happy to see that you found your happy land in CH. I have a lot of greek friends and I know the life for locals is very different than life for tourists. I hope that economy there improves because there are lot of nice people living in Greece. Not everyone though as you also point.
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Why
Hah, well, for one I hate debt. I also have no skill or get any pleasure from decorating. Houses need a hell of a lot of paraphernalia which get on my nerves. Family trips to IKEA are banned in our family because they are borderline divorce-inducing. As are trips for clothes. See I’ve no skill with colours, shapes, design, feel. I can appreciate a good composition, my wife’s good at that, and my father is supremely good at that, but I can’t for the life of me do it myself! A chair is something to park my ass on, I won’t spend a breath wondering if the chairs match the curtains, and carpet and bookcases. And who the hell invented curtains anyway!? Pain in the ass to hang, unhang, wash, iron…
Now for more serious talk, real estate is a great source of cheap 4-5x leverage, I understand that, but the flipside is debt, which is my other allergy. Then there’s all the shit involved…paperwork, laws, taxes, interest, interest on taxes, taxes on interest, taxes on income, depreciation, repairs, tenants (if you buy to rent). It’s cumbersome. Lefties will vandalise the place because “AirBnB is bad”. I don’t want to have money literally built into place. Don’t want to worry if my neighbours are shit, if the neighbourhood goes to hell, if the place is hit by a meteor.
As an investment I see it as putting effort to gather an amount x, then pissing 4x of it on a property (so now I’m in debt), only to get a trickle that’ll take decades to give me back what I put in, BEFORE it turns any profit. Hell UBS’s savings account gives 1% from day one. Yes, sure, appreciation. It’s vague, hazy.
And philosophically I dislike people hoarding space. There’s a politician in Greece who declared owning 167 properties. 167!!! That’s a small town. The mother of an acquaintance of mine owns a block in a prime prime retail location in Athens. That makes 200k+ per month in rent. Woman’s not worked a day in her life! It’s so lazy! What the shit are we doing here, looking at saving 5-10 CHF here and there when there are whales out there that wouldn’t get out of bed for 200k/day?! I think there should be estate and redistribution measures in place, which progressively tax large scale RE holdings to death, to discourage hoarding. I very much like stocks and bonds, think they are very healthy financial instruments, promoting economic activity and innovation, whereas RE is more…feudal.
I realise I’m a very unusual Greek who doesn’t like RE, but I’ve thought it through. It’s partly because most Greeks typically had no other reliable means to invest until the 90s, and we saw how that went, so they all plugged their savings into RE. Incidentally I believe high rates of home ownership were a blessing in the Great Recession, things would have been a lot worse for many people if they were kicked out of their homes like it happened in other places in the world.
Anyway, I do own a property to return to, and feel spending money in CH RE does my efforts a disservice 
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That was unexpected to read both statements within one post.
Jokes aside, I can relate to it. For me it’s mainly the inflexibility of RE and effort it takes to get out if I would realize it’s not something for me.
That’s the beauty of being a centrist, and open-minded
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