>But even at current market price: I'm looking for a 2 br apartment in SF. Average for that seems to be 5k a month [1]. In Munich, even in the center that's 2k tops.Sounds fine if you wanna be a rentoid cuck your whoe life and retire in poverty/homeless while enriching a landlord.
If you look at buying to own your property instead, Munich square meter is not much cheaper than SF, while wages being much less.
When I was working in Munch, all colleagues were renting shoeboxes while all form our team in Texas(DFW area) were home owners of single family homes. That tells you everything about local purchasing power of housing, since you kept bringing it up. Also, just look at statistics % of homeowners in US vs Germany.
And you don't need to live in super expensive SF or Texas. My ex German boss moved from Bonn to the suburban outskirts of Atlanta, not (just) for the money, but also for the quality of life(his words, not mine) and more advanced healthcare for his autistic kid that far supersede the treatments he got in Germany.
>That's the beautiful thing about our pension schemes: they mostly are built without the capital markets! All we need is workers
Correction: that's the worst part of our pension systems, since it's a local population Ponzi scheme that's unsustainable. The stock market is not perfect but much better, since its extracting wealth from economic activity across the planet, not dependent on the birth rates of your country or populism whims to sway votes from pensioners.
>as long as there are workers and jobs, there will be pensions.
That "as long as" is doing a lot of unrealistic heavy lifting here. Because what happens when a lot of those workers due to the economy go unemployed needing unemployment, or they retire themselves needing more people for old age care and to pay their pensions? Who pays for that? Which whose money? Who pays for the pension system then? You forget that all these issues of the public pension system have been papered over by content debt(money printing) to delay the inevitable collapse. Workers and people are as much liability as they are assets, and EU/Germany has been importing more net-negative liabilities than assets via their open border migration.