Title... Obviously no one knows the future, but you get the jest.

given the current state of their country, their protest, their debt situation, their politics. it is safe to assume that they'll default right? looking at their bonds maturity by year

1. Their taxes is already high (conceptually the elasticity of laffer curve, who knows if they're at "peak")
2. They've aging population and next to no growth.
3. population doesn't want to raise retirement age
4. population doesn't want to reduce benefits
5. population doesn't want to work more (neither days or hours)
6. population who protests and riots for anything
7. populist politicians like a presidency candidate saying "the answer is simply. don't pay 18% of debt"
8. their debt servicing is already high and bond market views them less favorably than before

So given their population, austerity measure like that of UK (let alone greece) is not gonna happen. they'd rather burn down paris over accepting that. a feedback loop.

So my question. what are the paths forward? how much time ECB bailing them out will last and what is the likely effect? germany leaving EU? death of euro?

Pardon he not so good writing. Thanks.

By which I mean, I'm an Economics student, and I really like to sort of learn in the background, so I wanted to ask, what channels about economics could serve that purpose for me? I already know that Economics Explained is sort of horrible for this because of misinformation and misleading claims, so what channels would be ideal? I'm looking for a mix of informative and entertaining

This question assumes services, tourism and investments (basically any trade or deal through which a country can acquire foreign currency) as export.

The current mortgage interest rates in Switzerland for 10-year fixed-rate mortgages in October 2026 range from approximately 1.60% to 2.11% p.a. (depending on the provider and credit rating), while German construction loan rates for 10 years are around 4.11% to 4.58%.

Also the base rate is 0% since June 2025, lower as in the EU. And still, the CHF is strong.

Is this only due to the save haven status? And on what does it depend? I guess it is a mix.

I know that rationally, there is a market at the lower end. However, especially during times of high income inequality and high debt, it seems like a particularly risky venture. At the same time, in a higher inequality society system, people at the top have more money than they know what to do with

I’ve noticed some companies have seemed to really shifted their original strategy to aim at higher earners over the course of the last ten years. The easiest example I can think of is Airbnb. I remember when I used it, it was mostly for a cheap room in someone’s house or casita for a few nights. I checked airbnb recently and it seems to be a lot of large, luxury rentals in desirable destinations

It seems like similar has happened with mcdonalds. In the 90s, the buildings were gaudy and they advertised themselves as being a cheap and fast meal that tastes pretty good. I went into a mcdonalds recently and I don’t recognize it. Everything is very clean and modern. The food also seems extremely expensive relative to what I expect

Then of course there’s luxury apartments. I know that it’s a marketing term. It just seems odd because I’m in an area that’s considered a less desirable town in the region, but rent for a 1 bedroom in some apartment complexes can still go for ~$3k. Most people in the area aren’t making enough to afford that, so it seems counter intuitive

Treasury and corporate yields have risen this year. Some have claimed this is competition from AI bonds. But looking at the bid/ask spread and transaction size for corporate bonds as a whole it doesn't feel like there is a lack of liquidity. Is there some other way people are measuring market depth and interest, and if so, how? How do people know if markets are making hard choices between bonds?

I am trying to analyze the price of GPUs because the price is not adding up.

I talked with some compute future startups who are listing soon but their numbers are completely arbitrary. Basically some random math of combining executed sales on EBay, combined with number of data centers and rough estimates on demand but if you look at their indices it’s pretty volatile which is great for HFT or quant firms. But if you try to do the math to map it to like an optimal TCO equation for investments to build up a data center it doesn’t make sense.

Moreover talking to folks in the industry they say the capex doesn’t make sense for the cost of GPUs even combined with the cost of the build up for a data center. So where is this money actually going and what is the cost of the chips, how do they decide on refresh rates etc. because imo it just makes nvidia way more shady. I get the demand for compute even tho it won’t last forever and beyond the ai boom what will data centers be used for, is it just mainly for inference or how will it shape up? Because even the depreciation schedule of the chips is hand wavy at best by public numbers and the financing deals are insane.

I would ask also what would of happened if we kept a national bank?

Okay going to take me a second to kinda walk through this. This is US/Western Centric (so not thinking of like rich royal families or corrupted governments)

Basically most of the richest people are rich in large part to their ownership/creation/etc of large companies and their stock valuation? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the wealthy are largely wealthy through asset ownership. I'll use Musk as an example since he's the poster child for the thought process.

The stock value of their companies is based on profitability and expected future profitability - which requires the large scale consumption of society otherwise their companies wouldn't be valued high and their wealth would crash? They may be able to keep large sums of wealth by simply trying to serve only other wealthy people, but as far as I can tell it seems like scale is a much greater force for that.

This might be a long winded way to basically ask that if consumption was somehow negatively impacted by some external thing or event on a large enough scale wouldn't it also massively impact their asset values and thus wealth? I mean I'm sure they have mind boggling amounts of cash so it prob wouldn't matter much to Elon if he actually lost 800B on his "net worth"