Last July, we spent the month in Kusadasi, Turkey, in a home overlooking the Aegean Sea. During August, we lived in Prague, and in September, we lived in Berlin. Before that, we spent February in Quito, Ecuador, and March in Granada, Nicaragua. (via Home Exchanges Can Help You See the World - WSJ.com)
This is our lifestyle: spending about five months each year in foreign countries. We do it by exchanging our two-bedroom condo in San Diego with people living in other countries.
According to Reuters,
« While membership in the European Union has brought prosperity to many, it has also made it easier to emigrate, drawing young people out of the east, especially rural areas, and leaving behind an ever older and poorer population.
Romania, the EU’s second-poorest member with an average monthly wage of $450, is one of the worst affected, with a 12 percent population drop in a decade, according to census data.
At the other end of the continent, the census in Latvia - a Baltic state which was seen as a great success story until the current financial crisis sent its economy into freefall - showed it lost 13 percent of its people, mostly to emigration.
Both countries have had to impose harsh austerity programs under the terms of International Monetary Fund-led bailouts.
Censuses conducted across the continent in 2011 showed Lithuania has lost 12 percent of its population in a decade, Bulgaria 7 percent and Serbia, still outside the EU, 5 percent. Hungary had 10.4 million people just after the 1989 fall of communism, but statistics office data show that slipped below 10 million last year.
Wealthy Germany’s population, by contrast, rose last year for the first time since 2002 thanks to immigration from the EU’s new members, despite the fact deaths were projected to exceed births, according to its statistics office. »
AGING populations in America and Europe raise many economic concerns. A popular one is whether aging baby boomers will tank the stock market. That’s story in this Wall Street Journal article, which says that when baby boomers bought stock to fund their retirement, that drove up share prices in the 1990s. Now, on the cusp of retirement, they will sell their shares so prices must fall. This theory appears to be confirmed by a figure from the San Francisco Fed, which shows a strong correlation between the price/earnings ratio and what they call the M/O ratio, the ratio of people age 40 to 49 to people age 60 to 69.
Does this mean we’re doomed for a bearish decade? (via Financial markets: This old stock market | The Economist)
