Ldear readers, our financial expert Volker Looman has been accused of not being a fan of real estate. The critics are right. He doesn’t think much of old walls in bad locations. Nor is he willing to pay any price for a house or apartment in a good location. And if 75 percent of the assets consist of two properties, then he allows himself to speak of a cluster risk. This week, however, he has topped his “dislike” by claiming that real estate is in many cases no protection against inflation! In return, he invited you to take a stroll through Charlottenburg. The result in a nutshell: The prices of many properties – regardless of their location – have gotten out of hand, and mortgage costs have risen again to a level that is generally not worth buying. And things aren’t much better for investors who want to buy rented properties now because inflation is breathing down their necks. Yields are too low to beat inflation and the risk of getting a bloody nose with a property on credit is extremely high. The winners are the people who have made money through real estate in recent years.
One of the earliest memories Katja Schäfer has is of a day at kindergarten. Her mother had agreed to support the teachers, so she accompanied the group that day. “One child cried and was allowed to sit on her lap,” says Schäfer, “and I wanted to sit on her lap too, but she sent me away.” She was so sad at the time that she still remembers it today, more than 40 years later reminded of this incident. And it continued in that style. Her mother had not a kind word for her, she never took her daughter in her arms. “Even when I cried from grief or hurt, nothing loving came from her. I was always to blame for everything, if I had to do something differently then it wouldn’t have happened.” The bad thing is that those who have narcissistic parents are often punished twice: those affected tend to later look for a narcissistic partner themselves. Katrin Hummel researched the phenomenon for a large, very informative piece.
Corona is still there, definitely for those who were hit hard at one point. And to this day, there is a misconception that Long Covid is the normal recovery from serious illness. But studies show the opposite. Like everything about SARS-CoV-2, Long Covid, the long-term sequela of acute infection, is sneaky, unexpected, and poorly communicated. Even in Japan, 43 percent of long-Covid patients self-reported that they were stigmatized as self-pitying, discriminated against or not taken seriously – although Japan is one of the countries that has weathered the pandemic well thanks to education and clear communication. Martin Korte, brain researcher at the TU Braunschweig and at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, has written an interesting guest article on Long Covid and the pitfalls of the “Babylonian symptom confusion”.
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Many greetings
Yours, Carsten Knop
editor
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung