I don’t know details about what he did exactly in oil and real estate, but I suppose that besides food, we also need housing and energy. We do live in a free market system and the state itself does not provide housing and energy. The state only regulates those markets a bit.
Perhaps trading in oil and real estate adds more value to society than being a sports or media celebrity.
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Because freedom of speech was highly prized in the U.S., the law makes a distinction between something stated as opinion and something stated as fact. In addition, “public figures” must meet a much higher bar than ordinary people to prove defamation.
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Perhaps trading in oil … adds more value to society
Nope.
Trading in oil has nothing to do with producing oil. I once worked for a company that made money by trading the commodities markets (including some energy markets like heating oil and unleaded gasoline). These traders make money essentially by buying and selling contracts; they don’t really care whether the contracts refer to oil, wheat, copper, long-term bonds or any of the other things that are traded on futures exchange. If you’re interested you can find out more here and here.
Traders claim that they provide liquidity to the markets, but having worked for one and understanding the business, I concluded that they are pure parasites. Long story short: Without them, real producers and real consumers would sometimes reap windfall profits. The traders make sure that that never happens - they skim off anything that can be made from market movements.
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Ok, you can invest in an index fund. If you actually have one million, there are relatively safe ways to invest and generate enough money (8%-10%) to pay rent and even have leftovers so that your nest-egg can keep compounding, but, again we are talking about normal people solutions (e.g. I cannot even pass outside the offices of the services that allow you to buy bonds, but if you have a million in the bank, you most definitely can enter there and they will serve you free coffee too 
).
Also, assuming that you found a legal way to get to one million saved, inflation might be an issue, but the general idea is that you don’t suddenly lose all your money generating ways/income in which you can add to it and keep up with inflation. Thus, a person willing to invest or spend 1 million euros can be safely assumed to have more money elsewhere or an income that made that money possible in the first place.
Yes, but last time I was there (2023), I walked quite a bit in Einhoven and Tilburg and there were real estate offices with billboards of houses and prices. There were a lot of reasonably priced houses (around 200.000-250.000 euros) for what seemed to me like very decently sized properties. I couldn’t tell if the locations were good or not, but we had a similar discussion before and if I remember correctly the Netherlands is one of the best places to live in the suburbs of a city since the country itself is compact in size and geography.
So, it seems to me that you could buy 4-5 normal homes in the Netherlands, rent them out and pay your rent in Berlin, instead of buying a house in a city that is actively facing a housing crisis (which combined with the BnB problems means highly inflated prices).
True, there are a lot of places where the asking price is high, but can you, as a normal person, expect to make/save a million euros to ever buy a house in the foreseeable future? 
E.g. Some people are resorting to even buying leftover real-estate in lava-flows to be able to afford the asking price:
Which sounds like something out of a fantasy novel, but here we are. Just because the asking price went through the roof, that doesn’t make it normal.
Theoretically, it is arguably a better idea to go into debt and buy your own house and pay to the banks the equivalent of what you would pay in rent. In theory, once the debt is paid off, you will have your very own house, while if you rented a house for 20 years you are still to square one and all that money is “wasted”.
However, in practice, it is a huge risk. Investing in real estate in which you plan to live in, means that you invest in a particular area. It creates attachments which you cannot just “pack up and leave” in case an opportunity arised and, let’s not forget the anxiety of mortgage. If you are debt-free and you lose your job, that is already bad news, but if you have a hefty mortgage on your head, then you are in deep trouble.
Personally I have opted for the “never borrow a penny for banks” strategy, just to avoid all those complications. Having worked for many years in the local mortgage office I got the impression that it is better to play in a casino than tangle with loans.
That is a really big issue indeed. 
I read somewhere that there have been “expert predictions” in some countries for a decrease in prices for the past couple of years and so people postponed their decision, only to find themselves in a worse situation when the prices actually kept rising.
Yeah, I am all for that too, but you cannot have “the opinion” on TV that, let’s say, (to find something ludicrous, yet non-real-world controversial, so this doesn’t get derailed) “the government is a front for martian invaders that have used all the gold they mined from Mercury to fund a huge dark network of global conspiracy in order to gain access to drilling the core of the Earth” and now expect from NASA to refute your claim or go around saying “see? see? they are not denying it! HA! I knew it!” 
That’s good for a private discussion where people can “free speech” as they like, but I think that it is reasonable to expect that the media should be held to some journalistic standards, even in opinion articles/shows.
Even if a lawsuit is a step too far - which I am inclined to agree with for most cases - shouldn’t there be, at least, a journalistic club (can’t think of a better word, sorry), that would pull some ears and say “hey, you are destroying the reputation of everyone doing this job, try to present some evidence next time, ok?” or, that would, at least, distance themselves from such practices?
I think that should be a very reasonable thing.
Imagine a top leading pizza franchise making an ad saying “we put rat-meat in our pizza, just like everyone else, but our rats are better! Ha!”. Wouldn’t the other pizza makers gather and react to stop that? Or should they go “hey, rat-meat sounds good! Free speech landed us a good idea!”
This is what happens with “modern journalism” and now we are all wading through the equivalent of “rat-meat on pizza”, which is click-bait, nonsense and “opinion pieces” (whatever THAT is. Neil Postman would have probably had a laughing fit at the idea).
If I remember correctly when we discussed that in that Magnus Carlsen case, I think that has to do with regards to themselves (which is why Carlsen tried to claim that Niemann was a public figure, while his own status as a de-facto public figure didn’t help him much because he was the one doing the defamation), not if they go on TV and start talking non-sense. I’d say that would automatically bypasses any extra things added by the laws.
House prices here depend quite a bit on the location.
In more rural towns/cities near the edges of the country, average houses are still available for 250.000 euros.
To get a 250.000 euro mortgage, the households needs to have a secure gross annual income of about 50.000 euros.
The median gross annual income of a working person in the Netherlands is about 40.000 euros. With that you can get a mortgage of about 180.000 euros. You could get a house for that, but your options would be quite limited.
With a minumum wage (40 hour work week) your gross annual income is about 25.000 euros. I’d say that isn’t really enough to afford buying a house, but a household with 2 secure minumum wage incomes would be able to get about 250.000 euro mortage, which would be enough to buy a house in a rural town. Or you could even buy a simple 2 room flat/apartment (~ 50 m²) in a suburb of Amsterdam.
When you take a mortgage to buy a house, you may pay twice the mortgage amount over a period of 30 years, but during that period the price/value of your house may also double.
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I’m not an economist, but I think trading is a necessity. Producers and consumers need traders to distribute the products from producers to consumers (possibly over great distances). Trading has been instrumental for humanity for many millennia.
It would be quite inefficient and inconvenient if I would need to go to the producers myself all the time to get all the stuff I need/want.
Yes, some people get exorbitantly rich from trading stuff, but some people also get exorbitantly rich from producing stuff (example: Elon Musk from producing EVs). It’s a side effect of having a market economy.
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Didn’t he get rich from PayPal, which is basically banking rather than producing stuff.
I’ll not comment on the valuation of Tesla!
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I assume there’s a distinction between “physical traders” (transporting goods and services, etc) and “stock traders” being made here? I have stocks and have made money off them. I am not contributing to S&P500, nor am I producing anything valuable to society. I am just benefiting off of large corporations in the vain hope I can diminish the impact of inflation.
Elon Musk bought Tesla, which was already producing electric vehicles. Musk made his fortune by making false promises and never delivering on them, or worse, claiming he invented decades-old technologies. If he wasn’t as rich and famous, he would already be in the same place as the Theranos lady.
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Okay then maybe Bernard Arnault (2nd richest person in the world) could be considered a producer (of luxury goods)? Or is he more like a trader?
Or maybe Bill Gates may be considered a producer (of software)?
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Sorry, gennan, but I don’t think you understand the kind of “trading” we’re talking about. It’s not companies shipping oil from A to B (which is course is a necessity) or buying oil in one place and selling it in another (also necessary). It’s “traders” who trade futures contracts on the commodities exchanges like the CME. If you’d followed the links in my earlier comment it would probably be clearer. They generally don’t even place trades individually, they use computer algorithms to buy and sell contracts. They don’t even need to know where the oil / copper / soybeans are. They’re just trading contracts. They make sure to close out their contracts before any delivery of anything physical becomes due.
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Aren’t they more like high stakes gamblers than traders?
eh, who knows what CEOs and company owners really do?
e.g. Bill Burr had a lot of good points on Steve Jobs:
yeah it is supposed to be funny, but he wasn’t lying.
“Jesus! Ghandi! Me!”
“New phone can’t fit the old charger, this is your hero?”
Funny how this video is from 2012 and Apple is still pulling off the same stunts, yet they still work. 
What a time to be alive.
They do not even have to know what they are and that has been like that for ages. There was that poem from Brecht about commerce that went:
Rice can be had down the river.
People in the remoter provinces need their rice.
If we can keep that rice off the market
Rice is bound to get dearer.
Then the men who pull the barges must go short of rice
And I shall get my rice for even less.
By the way, what is rice?
Don’t ask me what rice is.
Don’t ask me my advice.
I’ve no idea what rice is:
All I have learned is its price.
Don’t ask me for a source, it was translated in Greek and made in the eighties into a very well made song called “the ballad of the middleman”, so I am not sure about the original (I found this online as the “song of commerce”), but the concept of the “mighty middleman” is unfortunately not novel and since it doesn’t seem to go away, you should give it some thought about why. They HAVE to be doing something. 
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I suppose that this is the reason why market economies need laws against cartel formation, and we do have those nowadays.
more like high stakes gamblers than traders?
In a way, yes. But they use algorithms developed from a lot of data to ensure that they always have an edge, they have rigorous risk-control rules, and in the long run they win. Some of the richest people on earth made their first billion from this kind of trading. There’s a quick intro to the basics here on youtube.
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We do? First time I hear of this
As an added bonus, if you try to install panels and sell electricity to the grid you have to agree to a fixed price of 0,06330€/kWh for some years (ten iirc). However the price that the companies sell power to the consumer is fluxuating daily. At some point during the recent crisis it reached the scarcely believable 0.86 €/kWh while the price that was paid back to the people with the panels remained fixed
And that just the tip of the iceberg…
I’m not sure if this was a serious question, but anyway:
From what I can find, antitrust laws (and their enforcement) varied quite a bit in Europe before the 1950s. But such laws were an important part of the foundation of the EEC (the predecessor of the EU) in the 1950s. The US played a significant role promoting the enacting of such legislation in Western Europe around that time (the US already had more strict antitrust legislation at the time).
Greece joined the EEC later, in 1981, and for that it had to conform to the EEC antitrust legislation. From what I can find, Greece hasn’t been very willing to liberalise/privatise historically monopolistic markets, such as telecommunications and energy [1].
I don’t know about the current situation of the Greek energy market, but the Dutch energy market was largely privatised in the early 2000s, as were the markets for public transportation, telecommunications, postal services and health care. Some say we went a bit too far, especially with health care (perhaps specifically home care services).
Also, there was some outrage about the large profits that energy companies made during the 2022 energy price surge after Russia invaded Ukraine.
[1] https://www.greeklawdigest.gr/topics/competition-antitrust
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We did that, but what was really the point? The private companies just sit over the national network of communications and power, they use it, but they do not contribute to it.
Let’s say you moved away from the formerly national company of telecommunications OTE, which also used to run the networks. Not only those companies (with very few exceptions) never opened any physical stores or support hubs, but every time you called them for an issue all they said “aaah, everything is fine on our end, it is a problem from OTE and the network”. So, off they sent you in a merry go round and some good old ping-pong from service to service, to figure out if that’s true or not. Fantastic services, which is why I never went off the old companies in either power or phone/internet. If you are going to blame everything on them, I might as well stick with them, thank you very much. Plus those at least retain offices in my small town. To locate the nearest office of a “new power company” I’d have to drive 180 kilometers through the mountains.
And it is not as if the consumers gained anything from the “competition”:
Unless I missed someone in the list, Greece and Cyprus are the worst in Europe (and have been for many years).
So, the country is very willing to privatise anything and everything (there is a running joke that the politicians would privatise the Acropolis, if they could), but that doesn’t mean that it is an easy market to get into or that it generates any real gain for the consumer.
I know, because it was in that link I posted earlier. The Dutch energy market is used as a positive example, while our market is not.
Yes, that was the time when the price jumped to 0.86€/kWh.
Fortunately I had predicted the bandwagon of price-hiking that was coming our way and by then I had installed some 8 panels and now I am free from that worry.
Now if only I could do something similar for my water supply (the latest plan is to hike the local price 65% up, because that’s “a reasonable thing to do”, eh?).
(yes, this country is slowly turning us into preppers 
)
I’d say that in the Netherlands, competition in utilities markets and health care did make them more cost aware and more efficient with less overcapacity (compared to when those were financed much more by the state from tax money), and consumers are better off most of the time in most cases.
But when there is some (temporary) shortage of resources (natural gas in 2022, health care workers for many years already), there is less of a buffer from the deep pockets of the state to shield consumers from short term economic effects of supply and demand, and consumers may be confronted with high market prices (energy) or waiting lists (health care), and it may be difficult for the state to mitigate those effects without leading to state budgetary issues and perhaps getting into trouble for (alleged) illegal state aid to private companies.
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In slow news:
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