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Why northern Europe is so indebted (2021)

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Re: Why northern Europe is so indebted (2021)

#71

Post by wil421 »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #38
Hamuko wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where the hell are people "moving across the continent every few years"?

https://www.census.gov/topics/population/migration/guidance/... This is geoblocked in slovenia, but the google summary says: > Using 2007 ACS data, it is estimated that a person in the United States can expect to move 11.7 times in their lifetime If we neglect the student ages for those without student housing or living nearby, most people here move from their parents to their own place, maybe again if they're rentin…

I’ve probably moved 12 times including when I was a student and none of the times were out of state.

Re: Why northern Europe is so indebted (2021)

#73

Post by gus_massa »

adaml_623 wrote: post #28

I really don't like the graphs / diagrams in that article. I feel they need units on the graphs. And figure 2. is based on data from 2007 And figure 3. is comparing very different things on the same diagram. If this were an undergraduate project I would not give it a pass.

In Figure 3, what are the units of the vertical axis???

a) Million Dollars? Billions? Trillions?

b) Idem

c) Percent of the population? Is .6 on the left a 60% of the population or .6% of the population?

d) Percent of the welfare budget? Is .6 on the left a 60% of the budget or .6% of the budget?

Re: Why northern Europe is so indebted (2021)

#74

Post by anon4242 »

the_third_wave wrote: post #55
smcl wrote: post #7

Not Northern Europe, but Czech Resident here. There has been an explosion in house prices here, a truly wild one. I bought my place for 3.6m CZK about 7 years back and according to a recent valuation practices is "worth" nearly double this now. It is fucking wild, and tbh I kind of hate it.

That has been going on for decades in the Netherlands, I bought a (newly built) home in 1996 when the country still used the Dutch Guilder and sold it for the same amount in €uros in 2002. One Euro translates to 2.21 Guilders, i.e. the house sold for more than double the price in 6 years time. For what I got for a relatively modest semidetached house on 220 m² of land in the Netherlands I could buy a 22 hectare farm…

Sweden is a pretty sparsely populated large country and there's quite a wide range of property prizes reflecting this. In denser areas the prizes are probably more akin to those in the Netherlands. Just took a quick look at hemnet.se and right now you could get a farm for anything between ~30,000€ to ~10,000,000€.

Re: Why northern Europe is so indebted (2021)

#75

Post by dataflow »

robomartin wrote: post #44
cronin101 wrote: post #6

This is such a non-story, mainly driven by the fact that home ownership in Nordic countries is ubiquitous (80% of Norwegians OWN their primary dwelling) combined with the high medium incomes resulting in those houses being quite expensive. I’d really recommend not trying to draw any deeper conclusions from this data. Edit: by “own” I mean “have a non-paid off mortgage”, the tax on net wealth here actually disincentiv…

> 80% of Norwegians OWN their primary dwelling I see your clarification. Question: In Norway, if you pay-off your mortgage, do you still owe annual taxes on your property? If so, how much? What happens if you don't pay property taxes? One of the things that has always bothered me about home "ownership" is that, from my perspective, at least in the US, you never really own your home. You can pay off your mortgage, of…

Note, the term you're looking for is "allodial title".

Re: Why northern Europe is so indebted (2021)

#76

Post by ajsnigrutin »

nonethewiser wrote: post #48
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.census.gov/topics/population/migration/guidance/... This is geoblocked in slovenia, but the google summary says: > Using 2007 ACS data, it is estimated that a person in the United States can expect to move 11.7 times in their lifetime If we neglect the student ages for those without student housing or living nearby, most people here move from their parents to their own place, maybe again if they're rentin…

You didn’t address the “across the continent every few years” part. Moving frequently on average in no way indicates they are moving across the country every few years.

Even if they don't move half a continent away, they'd still need to buy a house, furnish it, fix a bunch of stuff, then live in it for <7 years, fix it up again (atleast cosmetically), sell it, buy a new one, all the hassle of moving and new furniture because not all of the old stuff fits, new fixes of stuff that was just cosmetically fixed, and in <7 years again.

Re: Why northern Europe is so indebted (2021)

#77

Post by notch898a »

lnsru wrote: post #66
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much new housing is being built there? I'm from slovenia, former yugoslavia, and the situation here is the same, making it practically impossible for an average couple to buy anything here (and we're worrying about the demographics, lol). Back in yugoslav times, government built large apartment building complexes, by basically finding an empty field at the end of the city, saying "this is a city, farms should be…

You’re there not alone. Almost no new buildings are being built in Munich. Everything in the city remembers Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Dozen new buildings build yearly are a shy rounding error compared to the real need. Rent of 3 room apartment crawls to 2000€ monthly. That’s roughly a salary of a cashier in supermarket or car mechanic. Buying is for riches only. Building does not work because of zoning despite ha…

2000 Euro sounds pretty good on US salary. I might work remote from Munich and snap that up. You could just convert it to a city of international remote workers or something, no need to have cashiers, bus drivers, and stuff like that in the city.

Re: Why northern Europe is so indebted (2021)

#78

Post by DavidVoid »

nonethewiser wrote: post #43
DavidVoid wrote: post #24

As always with debt, how bad it is very much depends on the interest rate of the loans. I bought an apartment here in Sweden a couple of years ago with the minimal required down payment ( kontantinsats ) of 15%, but 20% of my debt is still my student loan that currently has an interest rate of 0.59% (it was 0% a few years ago). I will say that the housing loans here have one potential issue though: it's very common t…

What are the interest rates now? Presumably they are significantly higher than a few years ago. Although maybe there is a delay.

They're higher, but still nowhere near what they were in the 80s and 90s (10+%).

The Riksbank policy rates is currently 3% [1]. Interest rate on housing loans is roughly 4% at the moment for both floating and fixed rates, it's up from 1.5% in 2020.

[1] https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/statistics/search-interest--ex...

Re: Why northern Europe is so indebted (2021)

#79

Post by the_third_wave »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #42

It's my understanding that the northern European countries have very low immigration rates which means that their existing (mostly native) population is entirely responsible for their economic growth. That population grows old and fewer and fewer young people are available to contribute to the state-funded "welfare" to support their parents retired lifestyles. So the debt accrues and the country eventually becomes a…

> It's my understanding that the northern European countries have very low immigration rates

Your understanding is wrong, immigration is rampant in Sweden with around 150.000 people (about 1.3% of the population) coming in every year. Some 25% of the population was born outside of the country by now, this number is only growing. Germany and the Netherlands also see very high migration although the numbers are a bit lower seen relative to the population. While these newcomers do contribute to a younger population they also have made the male-female distribution quite lopsided since the vast majority of migrants is male. Sweden now has the same problems as China has there with about 116 males for every 100 females in the 16-18yo age bracket - these numbers may be off by a bit (i.e. the difference may have grown) since I last checked these statistics a few years ago. Unfortunately the employment statistics do not look good for these newcomers which have trouble getting into the Swedish labour market with its high requirements on education which actually only increases the problems the country has in keeping the welfare state up and running. Pension ages are going up to compensate for this which goes against what the population was told when they were faced with a large influx of newcomers who were supposedly 'necessary for the future of the welfare state'. Had this been the case that welfare state would be a Ponzi scheme and any newcomer who was foolish enough to fall for the lure would end up working for benefits he would be sure never to get. In reality it is those who have already worked to build up the welfare state who get to pay for a large fraction of the newcomers - e.g. Somalian immigrants to Sweden are only ~20% self-supporting with the rest depending on government benefits, 37% of migrants from Africa and the Middle East - who make up the majority of non-EU migrants coming to Sweden - were self-supporting in 2016 with the other 63% being dependent on government benefits. The Swedish welfare state will need to be reformed or it will not survive.

Re: Why northern Europe is so indebted (2021)

#80

Post by [deleted] »

jltsiren wrote: post #70
sohtym wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Contrast with a society where the average education might be lower, less people having a stable job in a slow labor market, and if you lose your job there is no safety net. Educational attainment in the Nordic countries isn't actually that good. It might have been at one point. These days I think it sometimes looks good because some statistics count having any experience at higher levels, which having cost-free edu…

You should look at the statistics more carefully. Educational attainment means the highest degree – those with a master's degree are not included in the numbers for bachelor's degrees. Nordic countries traditionally had a system where master's (or equivalent) was the primary undergraduate degree in proper universities (or equivalent).

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