Assuming it works and has enough stalls. My experience with Ionity has been pretty bad so I’m just sticking with the Tesla Superchargers when I’m driving in a foreign country.
A family member recently got a long term fixed low rate mortgage in Belgium and I’m curious about how different things are compared to the UK. UK mortgages are higher, shorter term.
Is the Belgian bank losing money compared to the UK one? Is there state intervention?
In the UK it's long been possible to get a kinda long term fixed rates - at least 10 years.
They just don't tend to sell very well - when interest rates are low [1], it's not particularly appealing to fix at 2.69% for 10 years when you could fix at 1.94% for 5 years or 1.25% for 2 years.
And coming off the back of two decades of rock bottom interest rates, a lot of people didn't anticipate that they'd be remortgaging at a >5% interest rate.
There is no state intervention. Depending on market conditions, a 30 years fixed can have a higher rate than 25 years.
It’s basically hedged with long term bonds (Belgian or European) + a profit margin for the bank + risk based on your profile (age, health, employment history, …)
I guess UK banks are just hedging with shorter term bonds compared to Belgian ones.
The big difference is that in most European countries I know of you are locked into that fixed rate for the duration of the loan and cannot re-finance or pay
it off early without getting hit with huge penalty fee, essentially equal to the lost interest payments the bank would be missing out on. In the US you can pay off and/or renegotiate early without those penalties.
Not true, depends on European bank. I did pay my mortgage which was originally 25 years IIRC in Czech republic fully, one time payment, with no extra fees associated to this. Whether bank was happy or wanted me to keep paying all those years is another story, but their contract specifically allowed it.
In my French mortgage, I have 25 year fixed part, no point paying down that one earlier since the fee would be the sum of all the fixed interest for 25 years (what you wrote). Then the other part is calculated every 3 months from EURIBOR (not that great now, just like elsewhere). This one I can pay partially or fully anytime without any fees.
My Swiss mortgage is completely different and unique beast (also split in 2 parts, one fixed 1 variable from Saron rate), nothing you can see anywhere else in the world IIRC. 20% cash downpayment as usually, then in next 15 years I need to pay off another 15% of the property, and rest is just interest payments. We'll never fully own the property, and its very disadvantageous tax-wise to own it(so nobody here does it if they can avoid it). Swiss invented an additional property tax (Imputed rental value) that is calculated from hypothetical rent you could extract from given property, and you are taxed also from this theoretical income, even if its your primary residence.
This sounds strange.
Banks typically hedge their fixed rate loan portfolio because there aren't many equivalent long-dated fixed-rate funding sources available to them.
If the US market is such that borrowers can repay early or renegotiate long-dated fixed-rate mortgages without penalties, the banks are practically guaranteed significant losses when fixed-rates decline.
Do US banks just charge higher spreads than European ones to compensate for this? That sounds undesirable, similar to tax loopholes: everyone pays more to compensate the enlightened few that actually take advantage of something that _everyone_ would want to do.
The US mortgage market is essentially backstopped by the US government. Banks can sell the fixed rate mortgages to a government backed bank at a guaranteed rate and so don't have to hold the interest rate risk on their books. The US government (both parties) has long believed that home ownership is important and have a lot of policies to encourage it, this is one of them.
You can repay early in the Netherlands as well. A friend of mine works for a major bank to hedge the risk of their mortgage portfolio. He mentioned once that the biggest risk for Dutch banks is not the risk of default, but risk of early repayment. This always surprised foreign investors when they did due diligence to invest in Dutch mortgages.
There are ways they use to hedge for this risk. I don't know if this is desirable, but that is probably the case in the US as well.
Spain is also similar. We recently locked in a 2.65% for 5 years but 15 years around 3% was also available. That 15 year came with early repayment penalties though.
With your system, if I live somewhere flat and I go to the mountains, I will be out of juice during the climb. Tesla has a battery indicator in percentage and the navigation which is pretty accurate. Your ICE car has a gauge for the tank and an estimation of range.
Tesla should probably not allow you to show the battery as range as it will always be inaccurate and people will complain. But if they only show percentages, people complain as well.
The team behind Cowboy also has a history of going bankrupt and not doing the right thing. Their previous venture was a Uber Eats competitor and they took the end user’s money until the end but never paid the restaurants nor the deliverers. That’s the main reason why I can’t get myself to buy one their bike. But it seems Van Moof wasn’t any better.
And I'm hoping to ship my product in a month, even though we've already put in half a year and have loosely connected backend, frontend, servers and clients, most of which are barely a prototype.
Guess it depends on how you see things. I'd say it was up to SpaceX and they fucked up so badly that yeah, now they're gonna have to wait a long time to do another test, if FAA properly do their job and require more from them.
The failure of the flight safety system is a major screwup. I wouldn't want to be the person who has to talk to the FAA about it. Personally I'm not holding my breath for the next attempt.
How? They clearly have no launch pad system that can survive the back-blast. Unless they just trash another launch pad risking another rocket to debris damage.
Not exactly what you need but I think it may be close.
I’m running a SaaS turning affiliate platform content into an API which can be looked up by EAN13 : https://datafeedapi.com
Current users are publishers wanting to display affiliate links on their website but I could probably repurpose it for a more generic product search API without the affiliate links and different pricing. If anyone is interested, you can reach me at patrick_[at]_datafeedapi.com
It seems very far fetched.