samsonradu

What you're missing is that the EUR is not the reserve currency of the world and by running a massive deficit the markets will penalise you. (much higher yields, debt spiral, inflation etc.)

In one home, yes.

True, too much watching Bloomberg lately :)

Just tried to be technical, since 'affordable' is debatable. What I'm asking is how would building houses for no reason help in the current circumstances. Wouldn't the house also erode in value?

What purpose would that home serve? Is there demand for it or it will just suppress housing prices by increasing supply?

I guess the message here is that rent-seeking investments (positive yielding investments, deposits) will no longer work. Value needs to be added.

Some scary comments right here.

I agree that the internet is a more liquid and prone to winner-takes-all market. That’s why regulators tend to apply different rules.

I’m not sure if MySpace could be considered a giant at the time. Sure, it had popularity and market share, but it was not spraying billions around buying up competition or consolidating its business (Instagram, Whatsapp).

So Facebook didn’t take down any giants, instead it won a fair market competition. That was my point.

"It used to be a respectable thing to save money, now you're just hoarding cash!" - @Hipster_Trader

> Their world will go down in flames but everything else will likely continue as normal. > These opportunities still exist, the financial world of central banks is (these days) unrelated to this.

It's not unrelated at all. It's the central banks policies that are pushing the economy out of balance. These policies obfuscate the real risks that come with investing, like defaults and money-losing investments. Greece, a country close to default a few years ago and with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 180% in a currency it cannot print manages to have a 10Y yield of ~2%.

Not predicting any doomsday but I believe in the upcoming years EU banks will slowly push the negative interest rates down to consumers, as they have no alternative. Their business model of borrowing-short and lending-long is no longer sustainable.

Also, on the long run, these policies have the effect of shrinking the middle-class, increasing inequality and polarising societies.

Sibling comments make a point on how a physical store is easier to bring to market.

> It’s extremely difficult to project forward 10 years in tech.

I think this is a common misconception. Tech giants rise mostly because they create new markets. Since their beginnings nobody beat Microsoft on operating systems, nobody beat Google in search, nobody beat Facebook on social network market share.

The point would be that once you're dominant in a market it's very hard to be moved away and it takes more than a decade. I find it hard to believe a 1T dollar company can be outcompeted during less than a few decades.

Also as the tech/online market matures things naturally tend to slow down.

Just to get this out of the way, I’m not saying it’s a good measure but I think it’s trying to tackle a real problem.

Regarding the ecommerce market share I’d like to know the current numbers and the trend over the years. One should not wait for 99% to start taking measures, all competitors will be dead by then.

Regarding the physical stores Amazon isn’t really trying to capture it as the barrier to entry is much lower than online and margins are low anyway.

A town is more open to competition, anytime a third player can open up a store with relatively small investment. Meanwhile to take on a dominant player like Amazon is extremely hard.

I believe the line is drawn at ‘large-scale winner-takes-all players’. It doesn’t necessarily have to be fair but it is supposed to benefit the entire economy. As long as there’s a relative balance between the economical power of competitors no measures are required.

Watching the UK negotiating a trade deal with the USA and China at the same time, considering the current geopolitical climate, will be outright interesting. Also take the HK situation into consideration.

Hard to imagine a good outcome.

This is an issue in some cities in western Europe also, there are no free restrooms available. No wonder everything around train/subway stations smells like piss.

Paying back debt?

Well one has to consider that it's pretty much the same big pool of money chasing both. This money pool thinks that German 10Y yield should be around -0.60%, while the Italian 10Y yields a juicy 1.62%. That says quite a bit about the future solvency issues around Italy.

Bottom line is that if there are still positive yielding bonds in a market dominated by negatives (we're not yet there) the risk of default is priced in.

This, coupled with the pure speculation that before the bonds mature there will be a 'bigger investor' paying more (pushing the yield lower and the value higher).

While I find your comment quite rude, I remember having a “What the fuck!” moment when I saw the huge McDonalds on Champs-Elysees.

I'm not proposing any policy. Trying to assess if having assault guns causes more problems than it solves, considering it's hard to keep control of who buys/sells them in a country of 300M+ population. That would probably stand for a justification, wouldn’t it?

We’re also forbidden to keep plutonium or enriched uranium in our basement regardless of what we use it for.

Hell there’s many free countries where it’s illegal to possess weed.

Agree! If there's any inflation I'd like to see it's for sugar products.

Bad wording on my behalf, didn't mean any religious connotations.

> The gun culture is the locus of a lot of important values in the US -- service to the country, acceptance of danger, self control, precise and accountable behaviour

I have a hard time understanding what does acceptance of danger and self-control have to do with assault rifles? Can't those be exerted with a pistol?

Also I fail to understand how people don't see guns as a liability. Just having one in the house would cause me a lot of headache. Guns can be stolen, kids might find it etc..

Can you please elaborate on why guns are so sacred in the US? Is it for cultural/historical reasons?

Ah, speaking of code snippet of the day. Found someone’s code trying to check if a promo-code is already used, and if not to apply it:

    $codes = $db->exec(‘SELECT code from promocode’);
    if (!in_array($myCode, $codes)){
        // use it
    }

Isn’t cash the only thing preventing banks from offsetting the negative interest rates to the general public?

For the time being people would just get out of their deposits but if cash gets banned then things become more complicated.

Even with negative interest rates bonds can turn a profit if the rates go even lower, as one does not need to hold them to maturity.

This happened during the past 3 months with German Bunds fe.

I’m not sure that economies ‘can’ actually crash while running on 0 or below interest rates. I mean why crash when one can just buy more time, it’s free! Just keep on borrowing.

I think the real danger is on the other end, hyper-inflation. However, the reason this has not happened yet is due to globalization, cheap money in developped economies flow into emerging economies (China for the past decades), which is not necessarily a bad thing. We’ve only seen massive inflation in products that cannot be imported, like housing.

Just for some context, more than half of those users are in Asia (India, Indonesia etc.)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-...

The broader theory of Peter Thiel is that most of these advancements have been done in the rather unregulated ‘world of bits’, while areas related to physics, chemistry etc. have seen less advancement.

Playing Go against an AI opponent while in a 1970s, crumbling, subway system would make for a good analogy.

Armchair economist here and more familiar with the situation in Europe. The US has the highest interest rates among all developed economies (since December last year) so I assume that is starting to feel into the housing markets.

The FED seems ready to drop rates at the first signs of economic bad news and consensus is that it will this year. Party will go on until inflation skyrockets, no idea when though but I doubt it's too soon. (not before elections)