A friend here in the Bay Area bought a house in Bulgaria as an investment a few years ago, knowing that they were about to be admitted into the EU and the price of property would go up dramatically. He was right; it did. He’s considering selling it to pay off his Bay Area house with the profits.
Why would he stay here? Why not move to Bulgaria when the shit hits the fan here?
He said, when the shit hits the fan, this will be Bulgaria. No need to move, there will be tons of work here, more than there will be there.
Huh?
What he meant was, cheap wages are kind of like strange loop. If your country falls apart, and your currency devalues, then you are more attractive as an employee for global corporate capital, because you’re working cheaper.
Living here, he reckons, with tons of work that Euro-based corporations are eager to pay for with worth-less-than-toilet-paper dollars, while living in a paid-off house, will be a better deal than living in Bulgaria, which will be much more affluent by comparison, and with fewer jobs available.
May 10, 2008 at 10:30 am
Lets hear it for the magic of the market! It is self-correcting, after a fashion.
My theory (which is mine) is that market corrections are great if they happen slowly. If the price of gas goes up over ten years, people have a chance to change their living and working arrangements. If the price of gas goes up rapidly, chaos ensues. Same with cost of housing, or labor. For the US to change to a cheap-labor ecomony, major changes will ahve to happen (like turning all those office parks into factories)…it won’t be easy.