Almost everyone has experienced that luck is fickle. On the money and capital markets, which are a very accurate and quick reflection of what is happening in the world, it makes its current mood felt with considerable force.
A year ago at this time, who wasn’t invested in bitcoin, metaverse stocks, playing Game Stop, and talking about NFTs like they didn’t exist. The world was ruled by the phenomenon of FOMO, the fear of missing out. It is not surprising when the shares of technology companies grew at a rate of tens of percent per month, and it was not only millennials locked at home in lockdowns who became fabulously rich on crypto-currencies.
The symbol of success of the last decade was the unicorn, the start-up that sold for a billion dollars. The younger generation dreamed of the role of a successful founder, the older one of the admired investor who recognized the future Amazon. The size of the private start-up market reached an astronomical three trillion dollars, while only a fifth of the unicorns reported a profit when they subscribed for shares.
This year, the dream of an easily acquired Tesla or an electric Porsche vanished.
One turbine can decide whether the Czechia falls into recession this year
At the moment, the most watched and discussed industrial equipment in the world is undoubtedly one particular turbine that went to Montreal, Canada for maintenance. She was sent there by Gazprom, the Russian gas giant controlled by the Kremlin. But the turbine cannot go back to Russia. In June, Canada introduced sanctions on the Russian oil and gas industry, which make it impossible to export precisely such equipment to Russia.
Money for bricks and land
The war in Ukraine with food and raw material inflation has harshly shown the world that there will be no metaverse and that the smartest application on the phone is of no use if you have nothing to eat and drink, and there is also the risk that some rockets could fly in at night, God forbid.
The prices of cryptocurrencies and tech stocks have fallen dramatically, to a fraction of boom values, and those who didn’t sell in time lost their pants. The US stock market is now having its worst six months since 1970. Money has risen sharply and is losing value at the same time. The world meekly returned to the ground floor of Maslow’s pyramid.
What’s next? Heads of big funds already felt the change last fall, so big money moved from the technology sector to bricks, concrete, land, to the almost abandoned oil and other basic needs and raw materials and machinery. And a weapon.
David Ondráčka: Vary, films and subsidies. It can’t be done without them
Vary, the biggest film (and lobbying) event of the year, is over. The prizes were distributed, the tired guests went home full of experiences. And films, including Czech productions! David Ondráčka, an anti-corruption expert and former head of the Czech branch of Transparency International, described how the financing of Czech cinema works in the Czech Republic for Newstream. According to him, 12 billion crowns are turned over annually in the domestic film industry.
Investor winter is here
Visions, dreams and a future without real profit on paper are suddenly very hard to sell. The money going into start-ups is drying up, many are talking about the fact that this bubble has also burst. Venture capital funding in Europe fell by half in the second quarter of this year – although still at a nice 6 billion dollars. In addition to the “cryptocurrency winter”, there is also a winter in financing, the so-called funding winter, which can last up to two years. Investors will be attracted only by high-quality companies and not by exorbitant sums.
The start-up zeitgeist has metamorphosed into a new animal. After the unicorn comes the centaur. This is a company that brings in at least a hundred million dollars a year in regular fees from customers – a metric taken from the cloud business. It is a much more reliable creature – although such a centaur will not grow much, it will also not fall to zero when the charisma of the founder of the former would-be unicorn disappears…
Financiers from the ranks of venture capitalists are therefore interested in start-ups built on the basis of SaaS (software as a service), i.e. those that rent services to corporations for a long time. Nobody is curious about another cryptocurrency wallet or a new reservation system right now. But that is true until luck turns again.
A quart of butter is over sixty crowns. Almost all basic foods are at record prices
It would be difficult for a customer to find a store in the Czech Republic where food will be cheaper than a year ago and where the prices of basic foods such as milk, flour, eggs and butter have not reached their records. And they are increases of tens of percent – compared to last July, flour has become more expensive by 74 percent, eggs and bread by 40 percent, according to the data of the Czech Statistical Office. At the same time, food manufacturers expect further price growth, which will depend mainly on the development of energy and the war in Ukraine.
Czechs fear inflation and spend record sums on art
Fear of inflation drives Czechs to record spending on art. According to the specialized server artplus.cz, more than 910 million crowns were sold at domestic auctions in the first half of the year. And the records don’t end there. It also fetched a record amount for a single work of art, and for the first time ever, more than 50 percent of the works offered at auction were sold.
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