I read in Portfolio.hu today that the Hungarian population has bought 700 billion Hungarian forints worth of government securities since the end of last year, that is, in 7 months. Since I was angry at the large numbers – my previous writings are evidence of this – I took the paper and notices. To count.
According to the calculation, if we take into account 1 million enthusiastic and frugal residents, since the end of 2022, these million residents have bought government securities for 700,000 HUF per person. In such cases, one would think that the Hungarian population is approx. 25% of them live below the subsistence level: they certainly cannot be buyers of government securities. Although there is no specific data, I hardly think that there are almost a million citizens who now remember it. In exchange for an additional 1.5% interest (this is how much the best government bonds cost more than the non-best ones), he rushed to buy government bonds.
I conducted discreet research in my not-quite-small circle of acquaintances, and among the acquaintances I interviewed there was no one who had ever bought government securities. They laughed at me, if I may put it that way. Several people reported that they saw their future reassuringly in the euro, dollar and Swiss franc, but not actually in Hungarian government bonds.
Portfolio.hu also reports that the current stock of residential government securities currently stands at HUF 9,320 billion. Well, I thought that would be a good way to think about things. Again, paper and pencil (no joke! because my calculator screen doesn’t fit the entire length of the amount), so do the math. Divide this amount by the total population, which currently stands at 9.1 million.
Here is 9,320 billion forints divided: 9,320,000,000,000 – We have to divide this by the population, which is 9,100,000. By simplifying the long numbers (both numbers are simplified by 100,000, so we “cover” 5 zeros from the end of the numbers), we get 93,200,000 : 91 division. My computer can handle this, and as a result we get 1,024,175 forints/person, for each resident (written in letters: one million twenty-four thousand one hundred and seventy-five) forints.
Unfortunately, the population of 9.1 million includes approx. 1.8 million minors and approx. There are also 2.5 million of our fellow citizens living at the minimum subsistence level, that is, in fact, not 9.1 million, but approximately. We can count on 4.8 million happy investors, but at that point I didn’t even dare to count this (i.e. 1,941,667 forints invested per person).
I leave it to everyone to decide whether they think it possible for the able half of the country—whether happy or unhappy—to have nearly as much. Do you have a valid government bond worth 2 million Hungarian forints? I think this is not true. Then I only have two questions left:
- Are there really 9.320 billion Hungarian forints of government securities in the possession of the public?
- If so, do residents know about it?
Since I do not see winding queues in front of bank branches – where citizens wait impatiently to buy government securities – I suspect that citizens do not buy government securities. Moreover, they do not even know that they are buying government securities. However, the clients are mostly those financial institutions that may be managing the household savings. At most, they did not tell residents that their money was now in state coffers – without their knowledge.
Therefore, the financial institutions entrusted to the population – without permission from “the people” – poured their savings into state coffers. As you can imagine, that money is already gone.
How does this intelligence work? So that financial institutions pay a maximum of 6-8% interest to the public investing in them, while receiving 12-16% interest from the state on “residential” government securities invested in its name. This means that the state budget is performing well, because it receives money, and the financial institutions are performing well, because they are making large profits from interest – which the population does not see much benefit from. Maybe this is where financial institutions that make crazy profits in a corrupt economy come from.
All this, of course, is true if there are indeed 9.320 billion HUFs of household savings in state coffers. Our opinion: This is impossible, something is wrong here. This is very wrong. There is hardly a penny in the state coffers. Someone is not telling the truth!
The above is exacerbated by the fact that the maturity of various government securities is usually long-term, and most of them do not even have a guarantee of repayment. (Suppose the state usually undertakes this payment guarantee. The big question is whether this person is not lying, because he has been lying in the habit of late.) So the dear public cannot be sure that they will see the money they invested in it. Government securities… all you can know is that if he needed them today (Friday), he would be standing in line at the bank branch where he “bought” the government paper – that year.
In general, it is not necessary to take seriously the amount that the state declares as savings for families. This means that there is something wrong with the numbers. But the matter must be taken much more seriously. Have the banks that manage public money – in their hunger for profit – told the public where to put their money?
This will be my third question.
We don’t know where the state places it (“the state is me”), but we can guess.
The author is an American economist and private businessman of Hungarian origin living in the United States of America. In 1988, he was the first individual from Eastern Europe to establish a company in the United States. He managed the establishment of joint ventures in Hungary in the mid-1980s, when it was still new. The first “modern” company limited. It was registered in Hungary in 1986. In the USA, it dealt with investment advisory and US lending to local companies and trade. He is currently retired.
