L.Dear reader,
“It’s land under”, with these words Professor Martin Kirschstein begins the phone call with my colleague Lucia Schmidt. Then he bursts out: “As a pediatrician in 40 years of work in the clinic, I’ve never seen such a wave of infections,” he says. Kirschstein is the chief physician at the Clinic for Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine at the General Hospital in Celle. There are 33 normal ward beds and 10 intensive care beds in his clinic. Practically all of them are currently occupied. But not with Covid patients. Up to 50 percent of the beds are made for Needed children whose respiratory tract is so badly affected by the so-called RS virusthat their breathing, oxygen supply and circulation must be closely monitored. Some of these children need IV fluids so that they can absorb enough fluids. Others have to be ventilated because the small lungs can no longer provide enough oxygen for the organism without help.
The respiratory syncytial virus, or RS virus for short, is the most common cause of infections of the lower respiratory tract, i.e. the trachea, bronchi and alveoli, in infants and young children. Virtually no child celebrates their second birthday without at least one contact with the virus. Most children will develop cold symptoms and a fever when infected with the virus, but will be fit again after a few days. In babies in the first three months of life, premature babies and children with chronic lung diseases or congenital heart defects, however, the RS virus can cause severe pneumonia or even sepsis and thus become life-threatening. It is a view that doctors are moving something other than Corona these days; Corona makes complicated situations even more threatening.
Let’s move on to other concerns: Investors who have invested their money in one of the major stock market barometers via passive index funds have hardly been able to go wrong in recent years – unless they left the party too early. In the worst case, they sold at the beginning of the corona pandemic, when prices collapsed across the board, and then did not get back in. Anyone who invested 10,000 euros in an ETF on the MSCI World share index a year ago is now 3300 euros richer. Such broad-based funds are actually primarily considered to be a solid basic investment. The MSCI World consists of 1,600 companies in 23 industrial nations, and due to the broad risk diversification, it usually delivers relatively reliable, but not exorbitant returns. This description is no longer entirely correct: for the past ten years, the market leader iShares has given the annual average return for its flagship ETF on the MSCI World at a very respectable 12.7 percent. But especially after such an unusually long run, investors should take a closer look at their portfolio. A key question should be: Is the investment still balanced as desired? Tim Kanning did exactly that – what analysis has to do with American technology companies, read here.
Selling the company poses great challenges for entrepreneurs. For years, private wealth was the fifth wheel on the car because work and family came first. Bonds, real estate and stocks are now the focus in order to invest the sales proceeds profitably and safely. The considerations may be a luxury problem, but whoever is faced with the specific question of how a few million should be invested is just as “helpless” as the heir or lottery winner who made money overnight. This is a case for our finance expert Volker Looman. His conclusion: Selling a (small) business can be a lot of fun, but reinvesting a few million is currently not fun because the prices for real estate are off the rails.
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Your Carsten Knop
editor
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
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