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by lifeisstillgood 3620 days ago
My question is that with 10 trillion dollars in bonds that the lender now has to pay in order to lend to the Swiss / US / Japanese governments, just how good does the likely return on startups have to be to get some of that money re-investing?

Or is it simply that with wars, elections, terrorism and Brexit, everyone is scared?
1 comments
Noseshine 3620 days ago
Wars, elections, terrorism have always existed, and if by "elections" you mean Trump, business in general would not care (of course, some businesses may benefit more from this or that candidate). Business has been and is being done regardless of politics for ages. The guy who organized the already heavily ailing GDR (East Germany) another 5 billion DM credit in 1983 was the most right-wing party head of Germany at the time - the political differences between the players can hardly be any more extreme. Terrorism has in Europe has been much higher in previous decades - Germany, Spain, Britain (and I may forget a few other countries) all had their own very active domestic terrorists.

What's the use of pointing to negative interest rates - if you can't make money with the business you'd always lose even more. Same reason why pointing to tax rates is disingenuous except for special cases - either a business makes sense or it doesn't. If you don't show a profit tax levels there's no need to worry about tax levels. Same goes for your example, if the business does not seem viable what use is it to point to an overall difficult situation, should you continue investing into what you think is a bad business just because of that?

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lifeisstillgood 3619 days ago
Unless we are seeing the end of VC, then there should always be a new up and coming business. In which case there should always be an investment opportunity - and at expected returns better than negative.

Installation of renewable energy, mobile network roll outs, basic R&D for science, that alone could consume a few hundred billion globally and the returns would be 10% or better. (Sell electricity to 3bn people in india and China at 100usd pa / house - approx 100bn pa marketplace there)

I refuse to believe "well that's it lets stop making new businesses"

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