Why would anyone use wero when the digital euro gets released?
The article briefly touches this point but dismisses it saying wero and the digital euro complement each other, but doesn't go into detail on how. I see no point in a privately run digital currency when we can have a public one. I guess whichever has good privacy, reliability, ease of use and speed will win.
A digital euro is intended to the the digital equivalent of cash. It is issued directly by the central bank. Currently, consumers cannot have an account at the central bank. They have a balance at a commercial bank, and the commercial bank has an account at the central bank. Right now, you must have a private middleman to do any banking. The digital euro should offer a public alternative to that.
(but it probably won't ever happen, because banks are lobbying against it with FUD campaigns, they feel like it threatens their existence)
Wero is something completely different. It allows consumers to easily pay merchants, mostly online. The digital euro is not a payment network in the same sense as Visa, Mastercard, iDEAL and others.
It says they'll have offline transactions, if they have that, then you can probably make those "offline" transactions from Kms away from the receiver. We'll see how things evolve, I'm still not convinced that wero will have any use once the digital euro arrives.
If this will pop sooner or later, where should I put my money on?
All IT companies will go red
The US economy will go red because IT companies will go red
Banks will follow because their investments depended on the IT market
Gold pumped but is falling now (maybe a good time to buy?)
Crypto is crypto so no one knows (although we are close to the pump season where everything 10x in value, but it's still a bet)
Europe is detaching itself from the US, so maybe there's something there?
Maybe we can just buy non perishable essencial products now, because everything is going to blow up in prices?
Still if I buy a 2£ can of beans, later sell it at 10£ because its market value increased to 15, I'm still losing. Not losing as much, but still losing, not to mention I need to find a buyer.
I could buy a house and sell it, but the housing market is a micro bubble where I live that it might pop as well by the time I sell.
So where do I put my money now, knowing that everything's going to blow up?
That is why the current admin keeps talking about (and trying to push) printing more money. Because the obvious plan is to inflate out of the mess. Which they have been a little.
The big question is, will they succeed at accelerating it or not?
Considering most folks feel like actual inflation is > anything they can get from a money market account (and hard to argue with them!), that is why we have the problem we have.
If actual inflation > IR you can get for safe investments, it means inflation is working as designed. Mainstream economists make the argument that anyone who saves money is selfishly hoarding resources that could be spent or invested. The Fed is supposed to print money to purposely cause inflation, precisely to "tax" this unsocial behavior and incentivize consumption, riskier investments, and debt.
I don't personally agree with this argument. But everyone should be aware that the argument exists, many economists endorse it, and it is used to guide policy in many countries.
The person I'm responding to thinks everything is going to blow up. That means he expects equities to worth a lot less than now. The obvious thing to do is to hold cash.
So I hold ln to my cash, the bubble pops and I lose 10% to inflation because eggs will increase in price by 10%, just so I can buy stocks at a discount and wait 5 years for a 10% increase post bubble pop?
Sadly international diversification is far less effective during downturns, which is exactly when you need it. It really turns out that the old adage "when the US sneezes the whole world catches a cold" is borne out by the evidence: https://earlyretirementnow.com/2017/08/23/how-useful-is-inte...
I started getting concerned about the US stock market being overvalued in about 2019. If I'd followed my gut and ditched the US entirely I'd have missed out enormously.
Unfortunately the "guys, it's getting a bit frothy" stage can last for years and years. If you pull out of the stock market whenever everything's looking irrationally overvalued you're probably going to fall behind the unthinking approach of continually investing the same amount every month.
Although I don't think investments are easy to "bubble-proof" I feel like your career choices can make you more resistant to catastrophe. The strongest strategy of all (if it's practical in your lifestyle) is to be nationally and internationally mobile so that your job search can cover the entire world, and you pick whichever employer is most desperate to find someone. After that, you can sometimes transfer internally to teams that are more robust (in my industry we have teams that design new facilities and teams that run existing facilities - the ones that design new facilities are far more vulnerable to ups and downs as projects get cancelled). Finally, you can make lots of casual contacts in your industry (we sometimes get together for coffee or beer with other people in our city who do a similar job at other companies) - then when you're made redundant, you've got the inside information of where new roles might come from.
On the cost side of the equation, your choices of "how big a house & car can I afford?" should learn towards being more pessimistic, but often there's not huge scope for choice there in the short term.
Long story short, the glib answer to your question "where do I put my money now, knowing that everything's going to blow up?" is "leave it in the S&P 500 and be aware that one day it will blow up"
Is it really a bubble? The AI boom is often compared to dot com bubble but was that a bubble? Sure if you bought immediately before the crash and sold after you lost a lot of money. But if you were just consistently investing in web based companies from lates 1990s to 2010, how did you do? Probably pretty well. Web did change the world and create an immense amount of wealth in the world and markets. You're just focused on a short time frame.
Even the real estate bubble in 2008. If you bought a home in 2005 and sold in 2009, sure you lost a lot, but if you just invested in real estate from mid 2000s and kept it for 10 years, you prob did pretty well. Even the great depression had a sharp readjustment, but look at pretty much any 10‑year windows, including great depression, you'll see ~10% nominal and ~5–7% real annualized equity returns.
I think AI will be similar. It's a paradigm shift. Some of todays companies will go under and stocks will crash but over 10+ years, I think it will be a great investment and the industry will flourish, much like the tech or real estate bubble.
I think a lot of investors are looking at Europe/EU as a safe heaven, because it actually has strong democratic institutions that hold up the rule of law, and not some maddening kind that can tank your investments on his mere whim and a tech/fin oligarchy, eager to please and profit him while keeping the pyramid scheme going (while they build doomsday bunkers in New Zealand), until it all blows in the public's face.
If I understood you correctly and my math is correct, your suggestions only cover 6% of 650 billion, the news is suggesting AI companies need more than 10x more. So either it's 5 billion people paying 60-80, or 500 million people paying 600-800/month, or something in between + a little extra.
https://www.bike-ev.com/news/cars/byds-270-europe-sales-surg...
But these numbers don't split out only EVs. So assuming these numbers are correct, BYD would be below even Geeley which seems... odd. It's probably availability bias, but I see BYD cars every day and that's not true for Geely.
Depends on the country (I presume you're in the EU). In the Netherlands, there are loads of Geely vehicles (Volvo, Polestar, Lynk&co and the occasional Zeekr) on the road while BYD is relatively rare (except for city busses).
Which country? It's surprisingly variable. Note that Geely owns Volvo (or, at least, Volvo Car; the company that makes HGVs is separate) and Polestar; you won't see much under their own brand.
Well that would explain it, plenty of Polestars around; I guess I knew somewhere in my mind that they owned Volvo/Polestar now but I totally forgot when writing that
For all the press, BYD isn't actually that big in Europe. As you can see, Geely (another Chinese brand, which gets very little press) is actually bigger.
If you look at the data for Spain, where they're quite big, you'll see them, but they're not getting into the top 8 for Western Europe as a whole (which is what this site shows).
We have that. What has broken down is cooperation. The kind that has ensured relative peace for 80’ish years. That order is breaking down and creates instability. Instability means more conflict and less productive use of resources.
Yes and no. Internal cohesion is weakened (the most extreme example of which is brexit) by resurgence of nationalism and xenophobia. At the same time new trade deals and alliances are formed and deepened.
Looks interesting, but I won't be pre ordering when the only info they give about running Linux is "Linux as an app". Do they mean something like UserLand that's sloooooow or something like the linux terminal, that still has very limited graphical acceleration support and is still unusable for full desktop usage?
Either option sounds really bad and not worth it to jump ship for me.
Yeah - that part is disappointing as well. I'd be glad if it included Wayland support, native touch input, full OpenGL and Vulkan support - but I'm not counting on it.
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