Comments by "Ray Lopez" (@raylopez99) on "VisualEconomik EN" channel.

  1. I also interviewed there, but, fortunately, they rejected me for another candidate. My blessing.
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  2. Buying real estate as a speculative investment is the same as buying bitcoin. Very common in Asia, where you see "tofu construction" that's kind of a Potemkin village.
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  3. Default is easy and has no real consequences. Ask Argentina, which defaulted a half dozen times in the modern era and after some short term pain was back at the capital markets borrowing again. The reason this happens is that bond holders are sheep and often, due to laws, have to buy debt whether they like it or not (e.g., pension funds). I see not just Spain, Italy and Greece defaulting, but eventually the entire G7 including the USA. Probably all debt owed by foreigners would be defaulted on in the USA, and any debt held by small holders up to say $200k per entity would be honored by the USA in the form of a new dollar, call it the Amero.
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  4. Japan Inc was replaced by China Inc and soon by India Inc. Same old same old.
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  5. I think you might be called out for that...better to just copy data from Excel to paper and back again. I actually met a person in south Europe who was doing almost that, copying data from paper to e-form.
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  6. You a fan of China? That's all I need to hear to turn off your comments...
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  7. A Wall Street wag put it best: Europe is an open-air museum. Go there for vacation, not to build or design anything. BTW China's 'patents' are often two pages long and quite perfunctory, so I suspect their R&D papers are similar.
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  8. "south Europe"? You mean Greece? Since Italy and Spain and France are doing OK.
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  9. What explains South Korea compared to North Korea? Recall the north was richer than the south in Korea after WWII.
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  10. In fairness, go to the World Bank and check "GDP per capita" for various countries and see, as the narrator says, most of the EU is stagnating. The exception is like the author says the USA. Having said that, and as a dual national (I have an EU and US passport) money does not buy happiness. I have lived in developing countries (my partner is from such a country) where the people were poor but happy, more so than many of my rich neighbors here in the USA (we're in the 1% in the DC area, here most people in our hood make at least $120k a year, and that's middle class; the rich make about three times that; in California where I also lived I knew of billionaires and shook hands with several of them, not uncommon). In short, enjoy what you have. If you're healthy, you're wealthy.
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  11. True, as is ARM (UK founded), though ironically the USA pressured ASML to drop out of the lucrative China market, via regulation.
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  12. The US space station? Just like the Russian one was a copy...it's not rocket science bro.
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  13. I do business in Greece in real estate and I'm getting out. The good news: sometimes I have really bad timing, so I could be wrong. I wish Greece well but I'm voting with my feet...money invested in Greece would be better put into the S&P500 index. As for the current PM, he's full of gas, lots of words but few deeds. He recently stated that Greece should invest less in tourism, which is their biggest "export", with I believe 40% of their economy reliant on it. Yes, you read that right. This "political Einstein" (pun intended) wants to decrease investment in the tourism industry, their Golden Goose. I can tell you as a worldwide traveler that Greece could do much better by investing in their tourist market. At present, with a few exceptions, it is largely reliant on cruise ships and drunk and drug crazed young people doing their college "right of passage". The Greeks could do better.
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  14. Well in defense of GR most of Europe closes in August, when the boffins go on holiday for the entire month.
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  15. What if we only worked 4 HOURS a week? Then we could all be rich...just read Tim Ferriss.
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  16. Just a few...which is the point of the video.
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  17. Unfortunately even the USA has such people, they are called NIMBYs. Even here in Washington DC such NIMBYs want to limit the most successful tech sector in the DC area, the data center industry, supposedly because it's not green enough and disrupts neighborhoods somehow. Bureaucracy is one area that Washington DC competes with the EU on, though the EU has better regulation (the EU food regulation is world class for example; potentially cancer causing Red Dye #2 is still legal in the USA though planned to be phased out perhaps in California).
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  18. Why would they care? My favorite EU parliament story was when they banned leaving carcasses of animals in a farm field, which caused the southern Europe buzzard population to plummet and forced it to fly further north in search of food, all the way, it was said, to Brussels. Fitting. BTW technically according to EU regulations it's illegal to exsanguinate (i.e. use a knife on) an animal so in theory every farmer doing so on sheep without a vet present is violating EU law. The law however is rarely enforced, but it's on the books.
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  19. ARM too.
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  20.  @dzonikg  Like Sicily? I've been to Italy but only the northern and middle parts.
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  21. I think the main driver for "best" in the USA is money. Remember, many US professors are tenured so they don't have incentive to teach well, on average.
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  22.  @Dave05J  True tho Obamacare, decidedly "EU" in nature, was a win for the average USA worker.
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  23. North Korea, with a GDP of about $50B, about one-tenth the size of a large American city, could the the most influential country in the next 100 years, if they perfect their ICBM nuclear missiles and the rest of the world allows them to. With a "deadman's switch" on deploying such missiles, so if dictator Kim dies early they automatically deploy, and the ability not only to reach Tokyo and Seoul but also, soon, New York city, North Korea is poised for chaos. Sadly, I don't see anything short of nuclear weapon going off before the West acts. Let's just hope any nuclear bomb blast is in a remote part of the world and not that many people die.
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  24. @7:36 the "export to other countries" as a drawback is belied by the USA, which exports even less than Japan.
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  25. But unfortunately it's not Marx's rope trope re his quip on capitalism; rather, the EU is more Marxist than the USA.
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  26. Four hour workweeks?
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  27. Well IMO a better patent system would have allowed not just a general cure for cancer by now but also extended human life by hundreds of years (the two topics are in fact interrelated). Recall the 'trade secret' of Roman concrete was only just recently unveiled after 2000 years of secrecy (it's in the unique ash found only in Rome). Also the somewhat apocryphal stories of ancient Chinese inventors discovering flight but being put to death by emperors obsessed with maintaining their control over the population.
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  28. Commodities can be produced almost by anybody, whereas manufacturing can be protected by tariffs. For this reason the popular free market saying that "How care cars produced? You ship wheat to a country and it ships cars back in exchange for the wheat" is a fiction. The Structuralists were misguided but they had the germ of a good idea. Unfortunately for them, economies of scale made the "first mover" in manufacturing, the USA, the UK, France, Germany, Japan and the like, nearly unassailable. BTW Korea successfully did transition from an agricultural economy (especially South Korea) to a first world manufacturing economy, see the book by Joe Studwell.
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  29. Wanting inflation comes from central bankers believing the Keynesian and monetarist nonsense they were taught in Econ 101 textbooks. In fact, money is largely neutral, meaning that, outside of obvious hyperinflation, printing more of it has no real effect on an economy.
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  30. Such a video would go on for many hours, if not days or weeks. And bore most people.
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  31. BTW I like the TFP and "patents" argument, as I'm quite familiar with that. Kudos for mentioning patents. Having said that, I would argue the best and brightest in the EU and elsewhere simply move to the USA if they want to be in high-tech. Sad but true.
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  32.  @seneca983  But correlation is not causation... could be happy people just make better, less overly pessimistic, businesspeople.
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  33.  @seneca983  Well your second point raises an obvious "natural experiment" as they say in data science. You can see what the effect of a sudden windfall is, say winning the lottery. Does this make the lottery winner more happy? Well they've done this already, and found in fact lottery winners, who are often people living at the margins of society, e.g., desperate people, are often just as unhappy after winning the lottery as before winning, sometimes even more so. In short, "money doesn't make happiness, but instead happiness is found within". Having said that, some studies do show higher incomes can solve some obvious problems that result in a higher quality of life, tho you can argue quality of life (a longer healthier life) is not necessarily happier per se. Back to you, putative data scientist.
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  34. Cope on bro... I worked in Silicon Valley and shook hands with several billionaires like they were ordinary people. In the EU the only such people would be some German exporters to the USA or maybe some royalty.
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  35.  @tomizatko3138  lol. As T. Piketty found in his tome (you do read him?) if a society is at peace and prosperity reigns, you get more inequality (more billionaires). During war and decline, you get more equality.
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  36.  @Miho_13  Read my other reply. Also what you describe is known as a "post-scarcity economy" aka Star Trek economy. A nice dream but we're not there yet.
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  37.  @petervlahov8070  True, though a lot of south Europeans I've talked to want to or have emigrated to make more money.
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  38. It depends on whether you think car making is closer to Adam Smith style perfect competition, or, whether it's closer to a monopoly. If the former, then best to do nothing (free trade is best for all countries), if the latter, game theory says selective tariffs are not a bad idea, since, as Trump showed, China cannot really retaliate in it's largest market (the USA is a monopsonist, meaning they have a monopoly on buying power).
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  39. Milei looks a bit like the comedian Robin Williams. I wish him luck. Replacing a currency with the dollar is a good idea. The economist Steve H. Hanke often advocates for sometime like this. My view: given that money is largely neutral, except in times of hyperinflation, dollarization is a good idea and doesn't do any harm, and may reduce finance costs for importers and exporters, as the VisualEconomik EN host says. As for Argentina shows, on another note, default on debt has very little long term consequences either, which is why I predict at some point the USA will default on debt held by foreigners (they will spare their citizens this indignity IMO).
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  40. @11:00 mark the host assumes that money is not neutral, which I think 95% if not 99% of the readers will not notice. Money is not neutral means the central bank can control the economy by printing money. This is the bedrock of conventional economics since WWII (both Friedman and Keynes believed in this) but is largely not true (or very temporary, as in a few weeks), see the paper by Robert B. Litterman et al in 1983.
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  41. You'll do it and like it. You will be the guinea pig for the so-called economic theory of "money illusion", where manipulating the money supply supposedly gives real gains. As such,, the Central Banks may well decide that unless you spend the digital euro, the next month it will be worth less...
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  42. Not really, unless you believe in the heavy hand of history. That said, a study found that the Potosi region of Bolivia was poor back from the days of the Conquistadores until today, and blamed it on exploitative mining. A more physical reason might be Pb is often found with Ag, the main product of Potosi, and Pb causes re tar dation.
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  43.  @Trickaz94  Civilization resulted in skeleton remains showing native Americans in better physical shape than settlers. Blame civilization for modern ills?
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  44. Teflon (TM), baby. A forever chemical but a useful one.
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  45.  @souravjaiswal-jr4bj  Correct. And given about 40% of the US economy is government (i.e., socialist), and 60% of the EU economy is gov't (socialist), you can say "we are all Socialists now".
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  46. The latest scholarship shows colonialism often did the third world countries well. Think Hawaii (one of the richest states in the USA) vs the Philippines. Even a Nigerian on a BBC show once said Nigeria would have been better off as part of the UK. But that's not what the people wanted of course.
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  47.  @mydogsbutler  LOL dream on. GR increased the most in the EU coming from rock bottom. Nothing to crow about. Manufacturing in GR? Seriously? I do recall in the 1970s however GR tried to build a "kit car" and it failed. The only manufacturing I've seen is cheese factories and the occasional soda/water bottling plant.
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  48. Pace UK's ARM but yeah.
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  49. No bro, money is neutral, has no effect. The idea of the QTOM (quantity theory of money) is actually an obsolete medieval theory (first formulated by the famous Copernicus in fact).
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  50. If only every country central bank was like Switzerland...that would be capitalist heaven.
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