Politics, power, institutions, security and public debate in the age of AI.
2026-08-31 · Society · EN
Simo J. Lahtinen from Boston and Ali Omar from Hyrynsalmi join Sami Miettinen to work through the 2026 US midterms and the fracture inside the MAGA movement. The central claim is that MAGA is not one camp but two: the tech wing built around Peter Thiel and JD Vance, which wants more legal immigration and conflicts settled by diplomacy, and the groypers led by Nick Fuentes, who want the opposite. The episode covers the role of oil prices and the grocery basket in deciding the election, the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz, Thiel's network from Palantir to Anduril, Curtis Yarvin's tech cities, the erosion of dollar hegemony and five percent long rates. The second half covers humanoid robots, Grok and Cursor, Waymos on the streets of Boston and whether middle-class knowledge work disappears. The guests disagree at several points, and those disagreements are left visible in the article.
NegotiatorEP404Sami MiettinenSimo J. LahtinenAli Omar
2026-08-03 · Society · Research · EN
Recorded in English days after Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times before a Senate hearing, and weeks after journalist Jari Kuikanmäki's book on the pandemic's origins went to print. Kuikanmäki lays out the case he spent years building, and Miettinen presses on the second half of the story: how authorities, the WHO and the platforms handled dissent, why every country produced its own local truth, and what the collapse of institutional trust costs the next time an authority is right.
NegotiatorEP398Sami MiettinenJari KuikanmäkiCOVID-19
2026-07-03 · Society · Economy · EN
The summer 2026 row over the allocation criteria for STEA grants opens a larger question: what is the relationship between a state-funded NGO sector and the political parties. MP Tere Sammallahti and writer Otto Juote unpack the funding loop in which taxpayers' money goes to organisations, which buy influence communications, which lobby for more funding. It includes figures rarely set side by side: Finland has roughly 100,000 registered associations, and 724 of them received STEA support. The episode also covers Statistics Finland's GDP revisions, the weakness of GDP as a welfare measure, and parliament's own use of power — including Sammallahti's observation of how often it cannot be done becomes it can once a decision is genuinely demanded. Two right-of-centre commentators who disagree with each other at several points.
NegotiatorEP393Sami MiettinenTere SammallahtiOtto Juote
2026-06-21 · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen as a guest on Rami Kurimo's Puheenaihe, in the week SpaceX listed and Elon Musk became the first trillionaire. The sharper half is financial: a hundred times revenue tells you nothing about when the price comes down, because the multiple prices optionality — Musk's companies read as a stack of long-dated options, many unexercised and several created out of nothing. The second half is about Finland: imported Marxist class hatred repurposed as identity politics, a country that fails to appreciate even its own successes, and the danger of a subsidiary economy.
2026-04-30 · Economy · Society · EN
Two days after the Orpo government's 2026 spending-limits session, Martin Paasi and Sami Miettinen go through what actually survived: the self-employed pension reform, the rewritten taxation of employee share options, youth employment measures, the household deduction and first-home loans — and then the €17 billion annual deficit underneath it all. Preceded by a quarter-hour on the agent architecture both men are now running.
Sami MiettinenMartin PaasiPaasipodiFiscal policyTaxation
2026-04-12 · OpenClaw · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen as a guest on Roni Arvonen's Kuuntelija for two and a half hours on artificial intelligence: why AI labour is not capital in the Marxist sense but a direct substitute for human work, what that does to a pension system funded by wage-linked contributions, which jobs go first and which go last, and why the case for labour immigration weakens at the same time. The most useful stretch is an hour on how he actually built and runs his own agent — a Mac Mini, OpenClaw, a WhatsApp channel, the security posture, and never building a dependency on a single vendor.
2026-03-27 · Tools · Society · EN
Five weeks after the first storm warning, Martin Paasi has bought a laptop, installed the tools and shipped his first application. The sequel is a builder's conversation: a four-model podcast engine that argues with itself, persistent agent memory, why index funds and AI discipline are the same problem, a hard look at the Finnish media, and a live design review of an investment robot that tracks which strategy the market is currently obeying.
Sami MiettinenMartin PaasiPaasipodiArtificial intelligenceAgents
2026-03-23 · Society · Economy · EN
The Negotiation Club's original cast takes on four themes. First, a newspaper investigation into gifts given to MPs, where both guests end up defending transparency rather than the gifts. Second, the Constitutional Law Committee, whose vice-chair Onni Rostila has become and whose ex ante review he defends by comparing it with constitutional court systems. Third, inheritance tax and what incentives taxation creates for families — including Sami Miettinen's calculation of a thousand-euro birth endowment that would grow into millions over sixty years. Fourth, the Social Democrats' harassment inquiry. It closes on the members-only side with Iran and an assessment of who ultimately benefits.
NegotiatorEP377Sami MiettinenTere SammallahtiOnni Rostila
2026-03-22 · Economy · Society · EN
Topi Salin asks for a report card on the government and gets an argument that the whole left–right frame has expired. Miettinen's case: taxing human labour is a dying business model, superintelligence arrives on a timescale that makes the basic-income debate incoherent in euros, and the Marxist end state may arrive by accident — a planned economy run by free intelligence. Around it, the inheritance tax, the pension system as a negative-NPV contract for the young, and where he is actually putting money.
Sami MiettinenTopi SalinKeijon TuumaustuntiAIBasic income
2025-09-23 · Society · EN
The episode's organising concept is sumutus — Onni Rostila's proposed Finnish equivalent of gaslighting — and its separation from selective framing. The conversation starts from the Charlie Kirk killing and the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, and moves to how a media controversy is either harnessed to an agenda or managed down. Its most concrete example is domestic: a reception unit in Tampere whose cost was explained away as the cheapest bid, when the real question concerns how the tender was specified. It also covers cancel culture turning in both directions, where Sammallahti draws the line against his own side, and citizenship-based social security as a question of incentives.
NegotiatorEP352Sami MiettinenTere SammallahtiOnni Rostila
2025-08-29 · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen's first solo appearance on Puheenaihe, hosted by Leevi Leivo. The argument is arithmetic: a household with €150,000 has nothing left to invest after the flat, while a €270bn pension complex quite logically wants large foreign targets. Founding a company without capital is hard. The angriest section is the YEL mess — entrepreneurs' pensions were never funded, the state carries a €600m expense, and the fix sits with a vague working group. The second half covers rates, tariffs, the dollar and his own portfolio: cash weight, bitcoin and gold.
2025-08-21 · Tools · Society · EN
Kert Kenner asks the question a salesperson would: what does it actually take to build your own media, and does it make selling easier? Miettinen answers with five years of operating numbers — why most podcasts die at twelve episodes, why he keeps almost no backlog, what the channel earns and why he does not maximise it, why audio-only is a mistake, and why podcast transcripts are becoming the training material that decides what an AI says about your industry.
Sami MiettinenKert KennerMyynnillä on asiaaPodcastingPersonal brand
2025-08-20 · Economy · Society · EN
A solo episode, made at the Sisäpiiri audience's request that Sami work through a theory without a guest to argue with. He reflects on monetary systems, the euro and the EU by way of the Hamilton musical in London. At its centre is the ECU-2 proposal from Libera's 2014 book: twelve countries entered the euro by tying their currencies to the ECU basket first, and ECU-2 runs that backwards. A floating currency is counter-cyclical and the euro pro-cyclical — Sweden and Poland took the winning position. The Hamilton half is about what a federation actually requires: a one-off assumption of state debts and a tariff-funded tax base, neither of which the EU has.
2025-07-01 · Society · Economy · EN
A late June 2025 Negotiation Club on three themes. First, the gap between the Social Democrats' fairness rhetoric and its practice: the taxation of dividends from unlisted companies that the party opposes politically, and a newly elected mayor opening redundancy talks weeks after the election. Second, the Academy of Finland's funding decisions and the question of who may challenge public research money without the discussion being turned into one about academic freedom. Third, the American strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, the doctrine of the pre-emptive strike, and why air power does not change a regime. An opinionated conversation between two right-wing MPs which also concedes the limits of its own analysis.
NegotiatorEP341Sami MiettinenTere SammallahtiOnni Rostila
2025-04-02 · Society · Economy · EN
Recorded on April Fools' Day 2025, this Negotiation Club opens with an EVA survey in which 40 per cent of Finns see the public broadcaster as leaning left and 5 per cent as leaning right — an eightfold asymmetry. From there it moves to inheritance tax and what the debate leaves out: what comparable countries have done, where the money to pay the tax has to come from, and the fact that average adult wealth in Finland is EUR 150,000 against Sweden's EUR 300,000. The second half is Marine Le Pen's loss of eligibility and the structural problem it creates, why cordons sanitaires do not work, Finland's withdrawal from the Ottawa Convention, Greenland, and finally the question neither side asks: what did the money actually buy?
NegotiatorEP320Sami MiettinenTere SammallahtiOnni Rostila
2025-03-19 · Economy · Society · EN
The Negotiation Club takes on a word that two professions use to mean different things. A banker's capital is the right-hand side of the balance sheet — where the money came from. An economist's capital is the left-hand side: bridges, roads and housing. The distinction turns into policy: of Finland's roughly EUR 1,000 billion in national wealth, more than half sits in real estate that produces nothing and has been falling in value, while private financial wealth is EUR 675 billion, about EUR 150,000 per adult — EUR 150,000 to 250,000 less than in the other Nordic countries. The episode works through municipal balance sheets, imputed rent, the earnings-related pension system as a second form of taxation, what inheritance tax does to firms, the arbitrariness of the self-employed pension scheme, the return of avoir fiscal to the debate, and finally Germany's suspension of its debt brake and what it does to interest rates.
NegotiatorEP316Sami MiettinenTere SammallahtiJussi Lindgren
2025-03-01 · Economy · Society · EN
Ivan Puopolo hosts Sami Miettinen and, newly elected to parliament, Martin Paasi to work through the Murto working group's growth proposals — replacing inheritance tax with capital gains tax on disposal, and letting share exchanges roll over untaxed. The conversation turns into the sharpest account of why Finland cannot cut: a first-hand description of how a coalition government's programme survives, and Miettinen's own proposal for making the public sector produce more, better, with less.
Sami MiettinenMartin PaasiIvan PuopoloViisasteluklubiInheritance tax
2025-01-12 · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen as a guest on Roni Arvonen's Kuuntelija on Finland's most hated tax. The core argument is not about revenue: inheritance and gift tax raises around €1.3bn out of an inherited pot of some €7bn, but the damage is compounding cut off at the moment it has the most time left to run. Nobody inherits a sack of cash — they inherit a flat in a place with no market, held in an undivided estate, with the bill due before anything can be sold. Also covered: Sweden's 2005 abolition, an owner economy against a Finland owned by Solidium and the pension system, the euro and the payments imbalance, Poland, and whether Finland needs its own DOGE.
2024-07-01 · Society · Tools · EN
Recorded in Futucast's studio as one half of a twin episode, this is a working reading of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation with Futucast host Isak Rautio and algorithmic-influence specialist Mikko Alasaarela. The conversation traces social media's three waves — friend, follower, algorithm — explains why 85 per cent of games are now never-ending free-to-play, works through the American constitutional problem with banning TikTok, and ends on Miettinen's contrarian hope that a conversational AI interface could be addictive enough to rescue us from the short-video feed.
NegotiatorEP258Sami MiettinenIsak RautioMikko Alasaarela
2024-07-01 · Society · Tools · EN
The other half of a twin recording made in Futucast's studio the same afternoon as Negotiator 258. Isak Rautio, Sami Miettinen and Mikko Alasaarela take Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation in a different direction: the RC-car experiment that showed how fast a recommendation algorithm drifts, why boredom tolerance matters, what happened to boys, and whether the family unit that was supposed to replace all this still works.
Sami MiettinenIsak RautioMikko AlasaarelaFutucastJonathan Haidt
2023-11-14 · Society · Economy · EN
Speaker of the Finnish Parliament Jussi Halla-aho and Sami Miettinen discuss the Speaker's role, parliament as the core of democracy, and the Finnish party system's drift toward a bloc structure. The episode weighs the explanatory power of the left-right axis, the new cleavages replacing it, and the political mobilisation of trade unions against labour market reform. The conversation covers the Nord Stream sabotage, the future of Finnish-Russian economic relations, proposed settlements for the Middle East conflict, and the structural problems of immigration and integration. It closes on the communal value of institutions and traditions, and presidential value leadership.
2023-08-28 · Economy · Society · EN
A year after the Uniper negotiation, Miettinen returns to score it: what the worst case would have been, why the German state's stake was priced the way it was, and what Germany did with the gas price the moment it took control. From there to why he is unsentimental about Germany's industrial decline, why Finland managed to get poorer in nominal dollars, where the next banking crisis actually sits, and whether the BRICS bloc is anything to worry about.
Sami MiettinenJussi HeikeläArto Koskelo23 minuuttiaUniper
2022-12-06 · Economy · Society · EN
Teemu Liila and Kevin van Dessel ask for the step-by-step version rather than the platitudes, and get it: use Finland's open tax records to plot your colleagues' pay against their tenure, set the promotion conversation eighteen months early, come back with the goals your boss gave you, and then stay quiet. Around it, an unusually candid tour of investment banking — Credit Suisse First Boston hours, the Nordea deal Miettinen calls his biggest win and his biggest failure at once, project code names, fee structures, and why he stopped hiring his own mirror image.
Sami MiettinenTeemu LiilaKevin van DesselSijoituskästiSalary negotiation
2022-09-08 · Economy · Society · EN
Rahapodi obtained the Uniper negotiation memos by information request and brought in Sami Miettinen to read them as a negotiator rather than a commentator. His verdict: Finland sent the wrong seniority to the wrong subject, defended a sunk seven billion instead of the eight billion still recoverable, and never used the leverage it actually held — Germany's gas dependency and the option of filing Uniper into bankruptcy.
Sami MiettinenMiikka LuukkonenMartin PaasiRahapodiNegotiation
2022-08-26 · Society · Economy · EN
Journalist Ivan Puopolo and Sami Miettinen examine Sanna Marin administration policies, media dynamics, and public discourse culture. The episode analyzes public finance trends, national debt accumulation, and the interdependence between politics and journalism. The discussion addresses freedom of speech, journalism standards, and political personalization in the social media era. Finally, the role of media as a democratic watchdog and conditions for critical debate are discussed.
2022-08-22 · Economy · Society · EN
Jussi Heikelä and Arto Koskelo put the Credit Suisse wealth report on screen and ask whether Finland is rich or poor. Miettinen's answer runs through the €600bn of Finnish net wealth of which €400bn sits in homes, why only 1.9 per cent of adults are dollar millionaires against Sweden's 7, what Iceland did differently after its banking crisis, and — the part he was really brought on for — what makes a good negotiator and why Finland does not prepare.
Sami MiettinenJussi HeikeläArto Koskelo23 minuuttiaWealth
2022-08-21 · Society · EN
Matti Apunen — chair of the board of Yle, former editor-in-chief of Aamulehti and co-host of the A&M podcast — has called himself Finland's only republican. He explains what classical liberalism and republicanism in Buckley's tradition mean to him, and why every euro paid in tax is a piece of personal freedom surrendered. Sami Miettinen presses him to compare Finland's 42 per cent tax ratio with other Western countries and asks why Finnish private wealth has fallen behind Sweden's. The conversation runs from editing Aamulehti to Yle's competitive position, the decline of business journalism, and why statism is in Apunen's view the fundamental problem of the Finnish economy. Published 21 August 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP149Matti ApunenClassical LiberalismTaxation
2022-08-08 · Society · Economy · EN
William von der Pahlen, Isak Rautio and Sami Miettinen read Peter Zeihan's The End of the World Is Just the Beginning against Ray Dalio's changing world order — depopulation and deglobalisation on one side, debt and hegemonic cycles on the other. Miettinen takes Zeihan's demographics seriously and his deglobalisation absolutism much less so, and the argument turns on whether markets and automation can outrun a shrinking workforce.
Sami MiettinenWilliam von der PahlenIsak RautioFutucastPeter Zeihan
2022-08-06 · Society · EN
Alpo Rusi — doctor of political science, career diplomat and former adviser to Martti Ahtisaari — discusses his book The Kremlin Card: the KGB's political war in Finland and how deeply the Soviet Union came to steer Finnish foreign and domestic policy. The episode covers the shelving of the Tiitinen list, Kalevi Sorsa's CPSU contacts, Mauno Koivisto's direct channel to the Kremlin, and Esko Aho's EU opening in September 1991. Rusi recounts first-hand the phone call that saved Finland's accession negotiations at Maastricht. It closes on the NATO windows missed after the Georgian war and Crimea, and on a multipolar world order. Published 6 August 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP147Alpo RusiFinlandisationForeign Policy
2022-07-10 · Society · EN
Has peak woke already been reached, or are both extremes strengthening at once? Freelance journalist Matti H. Virtanen, author of the book Ääripäät, and Onni Rostila, Master of Laws, consider the US Supreme Court's abortion ruling, the rise of ultra-conservatism, and the role of identity politics in Russian war propaganda. The discussion covers the mechanisms of polarisation from schismogenesis to the Overton window, and the independence of Finland's prosecution service and courts. It closes by asking whether a heterodox sensible centre can save public debate. Published 10 July 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP145Matti H. VirtanenOnni RostilaPolarisation
2022-06-28 · Society · EN
Petri Kajander — serial entrepreneur living in Estonia, founder of the Libera think tank and host of the Talks with Petri podcast — considers why freedom is so hard to talk about in Finland. The conversation covers Libera's founding and the absurdity of the fundraising permit, the Austrian school, and how the crypto scene and the early internet carry the same idea of decentralisation. Kajander also opens up his own sweat equity model, in which he takes a stake and builds the company alongside the founders. It closes on a quiet mind and vipassana meditation. Published 28 June 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP143Petri KajanderLiberaFreedom
2022-06-19 · Society · Economy · EN
Antero Vartia returns to Neuvottelija two years after the first conversation, and the subject is the same as it was then: principle. The episode covers why flexibility can itself be a principle and staying in the truth its bedrock, what Ray Dalio's three cycles say about a changing world order, and what the book did not live to see of the war in Ukraine and China's Covid policy. It also runs through the link between the inflation spiral and populism, Acemoglu and Robinson's narrow corridor, the two classic market failures, and Compensate's three-and-a-half-year money-collection-law process, during which the company was effectively barred from trading without the matter ever reaching a district court. It closes on meditation, ego, and why executives practise it quietly.
NegotiatorEP142Sami MiettinenAntero VartiaCompensate
2022-05-27 · Society · EN
Can you laugh at anything, and who decides what may be joked about? Sami Miettinen's guests are Tuomas Peltomäki, host of the Uutisraportti podcast and for years a writer of political satire, and Isak Rautio, who runs Futucast and has done stand-up himself. The conversation unpacks the punching-down rule, offence as a weapon, and whether a joke's morality is decided by the teller's intention or by its effect. It also opens up the mechanics of a joke: what makes a punchline work and why repetition and callbacks make people laugh. Published 27 May 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP139Tuomas PeltomäkiIsak RautioHumour
2022-04-30 · Society · EN
Psychologist and podcaster Sinnu Savola goes through the televised defamation trial in the United States with Sami Miettinen, in which Johnny Depp sued Amber Heard over a Washington Post piece. They unpack why a side thread became the most interesting part of the case, and why social media sided almost unanimously with Depp before Heard had even testified. Savola opens up the forensic psychologist's testimony and how the surface level and the clinical depth level of personality tests differ. It closes on whether the trial is becoming a counter-movement to MeToo. Published 30 April 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP135Sinnu SavolaPsychologyTrial
2022-04-19 · Society · EN
Major General retired Pekka Toveri and Sami Miettinen assess what Russia is trying to achieve by Victory Day on 9 May and why Mariupol is both a symbolic and a strategic necessity. The episode unpacks the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, the targeting behind the Neptune missiles, and the role of Bayraktar drones as a distraction. The discussion covers the structure of the battalion tactical group, Russia's manpower shortage and recruitment from its poorest regions, and the effect of sanctions on arms production. It closes on the risks around the Finnish and Swedish NATO applications, nuclear rhetoric, and the value of a domestic defence industry.
2022-04-10 · Society · EN
The people behind the map project, Emil Kastehelmi and John Helin, go through the state of the war in Ukraine region by region with Sami Miettinen after the Russian withdrawal from around Kyiv. They explain why the famous 60-kilometre column was never marked on their map and why the vast encirclement rumoured around Irpin never existed. The episode also shows how open source intelligence is really done and why the team always digs down to the original source. It closes on Finland's defence and evacuation planning. Published 10 April 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP131Emil KastehelmiJohn HelinUkraine
2022-04-07 · Society · EN
Pertti Torstila, former state secretary at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and a career diplomat, has known Hungary for almost five decades and still grows wine there. With Sami Miettinen he unpacks Viktor Orbán's election victory: why the war in Ukraine became Orbán's trump card and why people voted with their wallets. Torstila also explains the trauma of Trianon and the significance of voting rights for Hungarians beyond the borders. The episode covers his own role in Martti Ahtisaari's team in the Kosovo peace process and an assessment of whether Sweden will apply at all after Finland. Published 7 April 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP130Pertti TorstilaHungaryOrbán
2022-03-19 · Society · Research · EN
Colonel (ret.) and intelligence researcher Martti J. Kari takes Russia's strategic culture apart layer by layer on the Neuvottelija channel: the cruelty inherited from Mongol rule, the lost proto-democracy of Kievan Rus, the idea of God-given autocracy that moved to Moscow after Constantinople fell, and why the infallible tsar's mistakes always land on the boyars. Featuring Ukraine as buffer zone and invasion route, intelligence failure on the Yom Kippur model, confirmation bias in Putin's inner circle, the rivalry between the FSB, SVR and GRU, the Lubyanka raid and Beseda's house arrest, oligarchs holding possession without ownership, the palace-coup culture, Kari's two years drafting Finland's intelligence laws, tactical truth and gibridnaja pravda, the unbroken line of influence operations from the Cheka in 1923, and NATO as a question of generations. Recorded 19 March 2022, three weeks into the invasion. Kari died on 30 August 2023.
NeuvottelijaEP126RussiaUkraineMartti J. Kari
2022-03-12 · Society · Economy · EN
Major General (ret.) Pekka Toveri analyzes the first 2.5 weeks of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the Neuvottelija channel: why armored columns drove into a clump and were shot up, why the famous 60-kilometer column got stuck, what the T-72, T-64 and the Armata 'wonder-weapon' reveal about the fleet, why the Russian air force cannot mount an air operation, how railway-based logistics failed, and why a false political situation picture collapsed the whole plan. Featuring Bayraktar drones, Javelin and NLAW top-attacks, Iskander missile stocks, the 'learned victory' of Chechnya and Syria, Putin's siloviki machine and corruption, nuclear escalation, China and Taiwan, and Finland's road to NATO. The assessments are Toveri's, made in the situation of March 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP125UkraineRussiaPekka Toveri
2022-03-06 · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen answers viewer requests with a solo episode on Russia's war of aggression, Finland's road to NATO and the resilience of the monetary system. In the war's second week the Russian advance is stalling, the 40-kilometre column approaching Kyiv is stuck in mud, and the air force in particular has been exposed as weak — a significant observation for Finland. Miettinen's view is that Finland and Sweden will apply for NATO membership in spring 2022 and will get in, and that the risk is at its lowest right now. The second half unpacks the sanctions: what Swift actually is and how central bank money moves. Published 6 March 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP124Sami MiettinenUkraineNATO
2022-02-25 · Society · Economy · EN
Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and host Ivan Puopolo recorded on 25 February 2022, the day after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. A contemporaneous record rather than a retrospective: what the balance of forces looked like, why Russia advanced without air supremacy, whether SWIFT exclusion or targeted bank sanctions bite harder, and the Finnish NATO question at the moment it stopped being theoretical. The last third covers the information war, the Russian-speaking minority in Finland, a market crash as a buying opportunity, and Jokerit in the KHL.
2022-01-16 · Society · EN
Tere Sammallahti is a candidate in the West Uusimaa county elections and begins by admitting he does not like the reform at all: his first campaign theme would have been to cancel it, but since that is no longer politically possible, the question is how to make a catastrophe tolerable. He calls his position hostage-taking — if those who want less administration do not stand, the counties go to those who want more. His example of the wrong metric is the nurse staffing ratio, and he opposes a county tax on empirical grounds. The most uncomfortable section comes at the end: if services cannot be produced efficiently, something must be cut. Published 16 January 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP117Tere SammallahtiWellbeing Services CountyCounty Elections
2022-01-13 · Economy · Society · EN
Nordnet's Rahapodi frames Finland as a hostage and asks whether the markka could actually be brought back. Sami Miettinen walks through the two legal doctrines that decide it, why the 2015 Greek near-exit closed the loophole, what the €67bn Target 2 surplus is worth in a divorce, and the parallel-currency design he would propose instead — before concluding that a euro nobody can raise rates in may be a gift rather than a trap.
Sami MiettinenMartin PaasiMiikka LuukkonenRahapodiEuro
2021-12-23 · Society · EN
A sequel to last year's episode, watched more than 120,000 times, in which Tuomas Malinen reviews which of his forecasts came true. The frame is the same: Acemoglu and Robinson's narrow corridor, in which democracy emerges from a balance between a despotic state and civil society. The carrying argument is constitutional rather than medical: if a level can be placed above the constitution by decree, on which the population is sorted, it will in Malinen's view be used again in another context. Miettinen says openly that he changed his own position two weeks earlier and sets out where he disagrees with his guest. Published 23 December 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP114Tuomas MalinenGreat ResetNarrow Corridor
2021-12-15 · Society · EN
Communications trainer Katleena Kortesuo and Ivan Puopolo consider when an apology is called for and when it is a mistake. Kortesuo's rule is precise and runs through the whole episode: you apologise when you have offended your own audience, not when the offended party was never your customer. The Africa Star row is her example of the wrong situation and Telia's response to social media pressure an example of the right one. In Sanna Marin's case the distinction produces two different conclusions. The episode also covers why a prime minister is under a magnifying glass of an entirely different order, the Jäätteenmäki case as a matter of procedural form, and Kulmuni and responsibility. Published 15 December 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP112Katleena KortesuoIvan PuopoloCommunications
2021-11-07 · Society · EN
Mikael Vuorinen, an industrial engineering student at Aalto who runs a YouTube channel, unpacks contested questions in public debate through statistics, and the episode covers three of them. On the pay gap he draws a distinction often left undrawn in public: the ratio of total earnings is a different thing from a comparison of the same field, the same hours and the same weekend work, where the gap shrinks to a few cents. The second topic is the Africa Star row at the University of Helsinki, where his criticism targets the student union's role. The third is Extinction Rebellion Finland, which he opposes on two grounds. Miettinen offers his own emissions compensation as a counterweight and asks why market-based mechanisms are used so little relative to bans and taxes. Published 7 November 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP106Mikael VuorinenPay GapEquality
2021-10-01 · Society · EN
A debrief recorded after the third episode of the Weekly Wisecrack Club, in which Sami Miettinen asks his guests how you actually live with free speech when your own livelihood is at stake. Miettinen admits that after more than a hundred episodes he still has a small amount of self-censorship running, and Sammallahti replies that the feeling is entirely natural but you get rid of it by building tolerance. Ivan Puopolo draws a distinction about his own position: he can protect himself, but not his business partners, through whom the pressure reaches his livelihood. The sharpest observation is the perspective illusion: Sammallahti's most widely shared tweet reached around a hundred thousand impressions, which means the vast majority of Finns never saw it. For a CEO they offer a concrete course of action when an employee is targeted, and the episode closes with why Finnish corporate communications are so cautious. Published 1 October 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP101Tere SammallahtiIvan PuopoloFree Speech
2021-09-22 · Economy · Society · EN
The second season of the Neuvottelija channel opens with the same guest as the first, but in a new role: Petri Roininen was elected leader of Sininen tulevaisuus (Blue Reform) the previous day, and the episode is recorded the following morning. The first question is one of governance — can the head of two listed companies also lead a party — and Roininen's own observation is that the criticism came from the right rather than the left. His programme compresses into the claim that the National Coalition Party has, across thirty years in government, been the chief architect of the social democratic tax state; his alternative is a family-centred welfare state. On economic policy he brings three numbers: 322,000 unemployed, a total tax rate higher than in 98 percent of the world's countries, and a gap to the OECD average worth 14,000 euros a year to a family of four. The most original passages are the five-tax wedge — two thirds of a customer's euro can go in tax before it reaches the entrepreneur — and the observation that debate on public finances stays stuck on income and expenditure when it should be looking at the balance sheet. The episode also covers the self-censorship that keeps business leaders out of politics.
NegotiatorEP100Sami MiettinenPetri RoininenBlue Reform
2021-08-27 · Economy · Society · EN
Toni Heiskanen and Janne Piiroinen wrote the first original Finnish-language book on Bitcoin and published it free online. The longest and most analytical part of the episode is a point-by-point dismantling of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Bitcoin critique: the zero-value claim rests on miners eventually stopping, yet addresses only the block reward and not transaction fees, while the slowness claim overlooks the Lightning Network entirely — never once mentioned in the six-page paper. In Heiskanen's view the critique matches what 2017-era critics argued before Lightning became common. The conversation covers Tether's stablecoin risk and the lesson of Mt. Gox, the energy use of proof of work and why a 30 percent fall in hash rate after China's mining ban did not bring the network down, and the market psychology of the halving cycle. The guests are openly pro-Bitcoin, but Heiskanen explicitly distances himself from maximalism as an identity and explains why he keeps an open mind about other protocols.
NegotiatorEP96Sami MiettinenToni HeiskanenJanne Piiroinen
2021-08-07 · Society · EN
Installation artist Panu Ruotsalo comes in from Billnäs to describe how the four glass-embedded works commissioned from him by Sami Miettinen — Power, Principle, Sociability and Analytical Thinking — came into being. The subjects are the four core themes of Neuvotteluvalta, the book by Miettinen and Juhana Torkki, and the question the episode turns on is whether an abstract concept can be depicted abstractly at all. Ruotsalo opens up the materials and symbolism of each piece: goat willow as the root of growth, 22-carat gold as the plane where everything is refined into something higher, glass as the sphere of the human psyche where anything is possible — and the colours, from whisky-toned Power to the endless deep blue of Analytical Thinking. The episode also covers Ruotsalo's move from photorealism to abstraction inspired by Reidar Särestöniemi, a work for Sisu Partners whose auction proceeds went undiminished to the New Children's Hospital, Aalto EE's art collection, and the revival of the Billnäs ironworks. The most unusual passage is Ruotsalo's account of why he deliberately avoids seeing other artists' work — and Miettinen's observation that this is the same phenomenon negotiators call rapport.
NegotiatorEP93Sami MiettinenPanu RuotsaloArt
2021-07-30 · Economy · Society · EN
Alex af Heurlin, a journalist at Helsingin Sanomat's HS Vision, describes what it is like to write about investing in a year when SPACs, the IPO boom, modern monetary theory and the EU's pandemic stimulus were all in the headlines at once. The episode is a conversation between two market watchers in which the journalist criticises Finland's first SPAC bluntly — 'why would you want to buy a pig in a poke' — and in which two readings of MMT are set against each other: for af Heurlin it is a creditable description of what is already happening, for Miettinen an accurate description of the system but branded from the left. Miettinen adds that MMT does not work in the euro area at all, because its mechanisms require your own currency and your own taxation. The discussion turns to Finns' weak financial wealth, a tax rate near the OECD top, and the zero-sum culture described by Juha Hurme. It closes on Roger Wessman's critique of equity saving, Bessembinder's research on the few winning stocks, and the power of the tech giants. Also included: a frank exchange on why journalists should appear as individuals.
NegotiatorEP92Sami MiettinenAlex af HeurlinHS Vision
2021-07-23 · Economy · Society · EN
Aalto University researcher Thomas Taussi argues that Milton Friedman's classic 1970 essay has been widely misread. Friedman did not dispute the importance of stakeholders and did not condemn all corporate social responsibility — he criticised one particular doctrine, in which a company's resources are spent on activities with no purpose of supporting the business. The episode's load-bearing observation is conceptual: responsibility sets itself no limits and does not explain itself, with the consequence that almost anything can be pursued under its cover. Taussi locates the source of his own scepticism precisely — the question is not whether the goals are good, but whether limits can be set at all on things that depart from the core business. The examples include Neste Oil's biofuel turn, Stora Enso's China venture, the Kemijärvi pulp mill, the Finnair deportation controversy and Finnwatch's position, the Google and Apple dismissals, and Basecamp's depoliticisation. Taussi finally explains woke excesses through Thorstein Veblen and costly-signalling theory. Miettinen offers a counter-reading that Taussi accepts as an addition but does not share.
NegotiatorEP91Sami MiettinenThomas TaussiCorporate responsibility
2021-07-09 · Economy · Society · EN
The Negotiator channel's first multi-guest episode: journalist Sami Metelinen, author of Libera's euro report, and economic analyst Toni Vuorinen ask what the EU's €750 billion recovery package is really about. Vuorinen advances the hypothesis that the package is an empirical experiment: the ECB buys the joint debt and converts it into a zero-coupon perpetual, and if nothing follows, the same is done to member states' debts. The end point of his scenario is a return to national currencies via Sami Miettinen's ECU-2 basket model. Metelinen considers it possible but unlikely: he sees a federal objective running back to the 1970s, and the over-indebted countries have no interest in returning to their own currencies. Both reject the claim that the package is an Italian rescue — ECB purchases keep Italy funded regardless. Also covered: the EU's power to tax, the 2012 Greek haircut as an example of bluffing, German ordoliberalism bending, and the Swiss model as a template for a workable federation.
NegotiatorEP89Sami MiettinenSami MetelinenToni Vuorinen
2021-06-16 · Society · Economy · EN
A quick reflection on Finland's June 2021 municipal elections, in which Ivan Puopolo and Sami Miettinen ask whether Finland has an economic right at all. The National Coalition Party took Helsinki, Turku and Tampere, but in Puopolo's view no party campaigns on shrinking the public sector — even the Coalition's right flank talks only about balancing it, and Petteri Orpo's 'growing the common cake' means in practice a larger tax take. On Iltalehti's values map Finland's most right-wing party sits on the centre line, with both main US parties clearly to its right. Miettinen offers a tax-rebel counterpoint: Finland's richest percentile is poor by international standards, the total tax rate is 42–43 percent against the OECD's 34, and by Laffer-curve logic a tax cut could raise revenue. The episode ends on the observation that nobody in Finland proposes lowering the tax rate.
NegotiatorEP85Sami MiettinenIvan PuopoloMunicipal elections
2021-06-04 · Economy · Society · EN
Stefan Törnqvist opposes neither the euro nor a federation — he opposes Finland drifting into them like driftwood, without a strategy. The core of the argument is a municipal-merger analogy: before a merger a municipality puts its own house in order on borrowed money, because the infrastructure stays put either way. Finland does the opposite. He closes by sketching three end points for the world record in stimulus: a crash, hyperinflation or political conflict.
2021-05-26 · Society · Tools · EN
Psychologist Sinnu Savola interviews Sami Miettinen on the social and psychological side of negotiation. Along the way: Martti Ahtisaari's fifteen-person negotiating team and the realisation that almost nobody knows how to negotiate as a team, emotional regulation as a stress function running from eustress to the amygdala hijack, why personality models remain useful even when crude, the alpha–beta–gamma roles in a negotiating team, why the seemingly weak role gathers the most information, and where negotiation ends and manipulation begins.
Sami MiettinenSinnu SavolaNegotiationPsychologyEmotional regulation
2021-05-16 · Economy · Society · EN
Aalto University's special adviser on sustainable development corrects a widespread misunderstanding: the EU taxonomy is not merely a climate instrument but rests on six criteria. She describes how it swelled from an investor's tool into a political instrument, and warns against national over-implementation. Miettinen presses her on the treatment of hydro and nuclear power. In the background, a shared student-politics victory and the birth of Aalto University as a merger of three egos.
2021-05-08 · Economy · Society · EN
Tuomas Malinen returns to the channel just before the decisive vote on the EU recovery instrument and calls on Parliament to vote it down. The core argument sits in Articles 310 and 125: once they are set aside, no treaty article can be relied on again — security guarantees included. Two consolations are taken apart, the claim of an investment programme and the claim that the ECB will monetise it away, alongside the question of who bears responsibility if 'one-off' does not hold.
2021-05-06 · Society · Economy · EN
Marjo Miettinen, chair of Ensto Group and of Technology Industries of Finland, opens up a concept she found in her father's diaries: the owner's tripartite, in which the owner takes the risk, the employee brings the competence, and society's task is to create the operating environment. The episode also covers her doctoral thesis on shop stewards, where grounded theory produced 59 competence areas in six categories — showing the role to be far more demanding than the employer-side stereotype allows. It continues into Technology Industries' dual-membership solution, the merits and drawbacks of universally applicable collective agreements, industrial peace seen through an international owner's eyes, and trust as a property of institutions. Recorded in May 2021, months before anyone knew how many companies would choose national bargaining.
NegotiatorEP76Sami MiettinenMarjo MiettinenTrust
2021-04-28 · Economy · Society · EN
Ville Valkonen, who heads advocacy at the Finnish Landlord Association, explains why the rental market is local down to the city block and why the largest centres have pulled away from mid-sized cities. The core of the episode is the tension between debt and regulation: leverage is all but compulsory, yet a buyer should be able to see how many layers of debt hide inside a flat's price. Also: the financing-charge tax tightening, the 450 per cent debt cap proposal, the limits of Airbnb, and three pressures on construction.
2021-04-18 · Society · Research · EN
Doctor of philosophy and 15-year MEP Eija-Riitta Korhola explains what makes a problem wicked: a one-dimensional solution creates further problems. The practical cases are blocking the waste incineration directive as a first-term MEP, the swinging regulation of biofuels, and Germany's Energiewende. The episode closes on why labelling people's motives poisons decision-making, and why one must be able to change one's mind.
2021-03-27 · Society · Economy · EN
Sami Kuusela unpacks the term he coined — business socialism: many entrepreneurs love business but do not find their values on the right. The core claim is that safety nets are precisely what make Finns free to take risk — met by Sami Miettinen's counter-figures on the total tax rate, the subsidiary economy and the shortage of capital. Also: Kuusela's own journey from 'hoodie guy' to humbled clarifier, the municipal campaign, and a bolder Helsinki.
2021-03-14 · Society · Economy · EN
Heikki Pursiainen revisits the arguments of his book Paska Suomi five years on: which he still stands behind and where he has softened. At the centre is the state-centredness of Finnish civil society and culture, the question of where the line for public support runs, and what digitalisation does to the justifications for public broadcasting and library compensation.
2021-03-07 · Society · EN
Journalist and author Matti Virtanen discusses his forthcoming book on political extremes and identity politics. The episode traces identity politics to 1970s America, sets out Eric Hobsbawm's defence of universalism against fragmentation, and works through the Finnish version: the National Coalition's mayoral race, Atte Kaleva's communist joke, the trans law and the fight over word choices, and reporting trips to Sápmi and to nationalist circles.
2021-02-28 · Society · EN
Leevi Leivo of the Puheenaihe podcast opens up Benedict Anderson's classic Imagined Communities: how a shared language, media and capitalism built the nation state. The episode separates community from network, weighs the climate movement, sports clubs and online platforms as transnational communities, and argues that the central problem of our time is communitylessness.
2021-02-05 · Economy · Society · EN
Tuomas Malinen, CEO of GnS Economics, argues that the EU recovery fund is not a one-off but the end point of a transfer union, and that currency unions historically have only two directions: they break up, or they become political unions. The episode covers the two functions of an exchange rate, Esko Aho's 1998 warning, and why Finland's longest recession came during a period without a currency of its own.
2021-02-01 · Economy · Society · EN
Chief economist Mauri Kotamäki unpacks the concept of elasticity and its link to the Laffer curve, explains why micro and macro elasticities lead to different policy conclusions, and takes apart the structural unfairness of Finnish earnings-related unemployment insurance: every employee pays the contribution, but only fund members receive the earnings-related part.
2021-01-12 · Society · EN
Recorded six days after the storming of the Capitol and a week before the inauguration, researcher Antti Ronkainen reads the event as a chain of security failures with an unresolved question of intent at its centre. The episode covers why Trump was never capable of a conventional coup, the split between Republican 'gamers' and 'breakers', why holding the Senate would have served the party better than Trump did, and what the coordinated deplatforming of a sitting president means for the relationship between Big Tech and power.
NegotiatorEP57Sami MiettinenAntti RonkainenDonald Trump
2021-01-07 · Society · Economy · EN
Compensate CEO Elina Kajosaari explains why the carbon sequestration market is the Wild West and what verifying quality compensation actually takes: of roughly a hundred projects drawn from the best of the two best-known standards, only about ten per cent passed Compensate's own criteria. The episode covers the design flaw in capitalism that leaves climate harm out of prices, the correct order of reduction and compensation, over-compensation through quality multipliers, and the Finnish legal ambiguity that froze the whole sector — is sequestering carbon a service or a money collection?
NegotiatorEP56Sami MiettinenElina KajosaariCompensate
2021-01-01 · Society · Tools · EN
Kaisa Mäkelä, founder of the startup Awareness Recreated, discusses consciousness, cognitive distortions and how non-verbal feedback exposes your own biases. This is an informal feedback episode that also covers the non-verbal synchronisation broken by remote work, the channel dependency of online communities, and trolls as a psychological phenomenon. Towards the end Miettinen challenges the standing of Freud and Jung, and Mäkelä explains why the old theories have survived — even though they are details within an extremely broad science.
NegotiatorEP55Sami MiettinenKaisa MäkeläPsychology
2020-12-23 · Society · Economy · EN
The channel's audience voted for the year's closing episode and chose Tuomas Malinen on the Great Reset. He argues the V-shaped recovery is artificial — built on record global debt and debt moratoria that suspend normal bankruptcy law — and reads the World Economic Forum's programme as a path towards greater state control sold on attractive language. The episode covers central bank digital currency, Acemoglu and Robinson's narrow corridor, and Malinen's own recipe: take the economic hit, keep the freedoms.
NegotiatorEP54Sami MiettinenTuomas MalinenGreat Reset
2020-12-17 · Economy · Society · EN
Elina Valtonen (still Lepomäki at the time of recording), deputy chair of the National Coalition Party, works through the themes of her book Vapauden voitto and answers the question the channel's viewers sent in: has she become a defender of the euro and a federal Europe? The answer is no — the monetary union has, on her account, stood on clay feet almost from the start. The episode opens up the basic account she designed in 2013, universalism as a principle for allocating public goods, the 95/5 split in earnings-related unemployment funding, the spending automaton built into the health and social services reform, and why federalism means the opposite in Germany to what it means in Finland. It closes on whether the ECB's digital euro could deliver a basic account — and on Miettinen's ECU-2 model.
NegotiatorEP53Sami MiettinenElina ValtonenElina Lepomäki
2020-12-12 · Economy · Society · EN
Tiina Landau, co-author of a book on earning excess returns through responsibility, unpacks the mechanics of responsible investing from a practitioner's standpoint. The episode opens by correcting Milton Friedman — he never said profit should be made at any cost — and moves on to Maersk's Indian shipbreaking beaches, where Norway's KLP did not sell but stayed to engage. It covers the three letters of ESG and how their order came about, the toolkit of influence from exclusion to activist funds, Stora Enso's Chinese pulp mill as a genuinely contested case, green bonds and the EU taxonomy — and Landau's daily question: is responsibility risk management or impact?
NegotiatorEP52Sami MiettinenTiina LandauResponsible investing
2020-12-08 · Society · EN
Journalist Ivan Puopolo argues that free speech is a relationship between a citizen and the state and nothing else — which is why a broadcaster, an employer or a platform declining to publish you restricts nothing. The episode opens with a live free speech test on Puopolo's own identities and moves through the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, what the word 'structural' adds to 'racism', why Macron's Enlightenment defence found so few supporters, the problem of judging intent in hate speech law, and the Nordic gender equality paradox. Miettinen pushes back throughout on bias in hiring and on whether the market really corrects it.
NegotiatorEP51Sami MiettinenIvan PuopoloFree speech
2020-12-03 · Society · Economy · EN
Christian Democrat leader and former MEP Sari Essayah answers the claim Sami Miettinen heard on a visit to the European Parliament: there is no opposition in the EU. Her answer is partly yes and more interesting than a yes — there is no government-versus-opposition structure, and what takes its place is a triangle in which the Commission and Parliament form a pair and the Council is the body that watches the money. The episode covers the Commission's monopoly on initiative, the division of labour between rapporteur and shadow rapporteur, the drift from directives to regulations, the failure of the lead-candidate system, and the passage of the recovery fund, in which treaty articles were, in her words, interpreted very creatively. She closes with a concrete reform: give the Council a right of initiative.
NegotiatorEP50Sami MiettinenSari EssayahEU
2020-11-25 · Economy · Society · EN
Kim Väisänen and Sami Miettinen work through how a person actually moves between wealth classes in Finland — and why most imagined shortcuts are not shortcuts. The episode dismantles the myth that income classes are permanent, notes that Finland's poorest postcode is almost always Otaniemi, and works out what the 1:10 ratio between earned and capital income means for the tax debate. Startup investing turns out to be a poor route to wealth, leaving one: building and selling a company. Väisänen sets out the five things that have to be right for a good exit, and why preparation takes two years rather than two quarters.
NegotiatorEP48Sami MiettinenKim VäisänenExit
2020-11-24 · Economy · Society · EN
The episode where Sami Miettinen's ECU-2 proposal meets a serious opponent. Puheenaihe put him opposite MP and economist Juhana Vartiainen, who does not buy it. The proposal is to reverse the euro's own construction: reintroduce national currencies as parallel money and define the euro juridically as their weighted sum. Vartiainen's objection is direct — if the willingness to tax German surpluses does not exist, no currency architecture creates it, and Finland's adjustment problem is domestic. Also covered: Target2, federation without transfers, fiscal dominance and Greece in 2015.
2020-10-29 · Economy · Society · EN
GNS Economics' Tuomas Malinen and Sami Miettinen work through the economic consequences of the coronavirus second wave and arrive at the episode's central worry: every solution being offered to the crisis is a centralised one. The economy already collapsed in the second quarter, and that collapse has been prevented from realising through bankruptcy moratoria — a carpet pulled over the chasm. The core of the discussion is central bank digital currency and the Chinese model, in which private payment systems are forced to settle in central bank money, opening a path where the commercial banking system becomes unnecessary. Malinen closes on the question the episode keeps returning to: will we let fear take away freedoms bought with tens of millions of lives?
NegotiatorEP43Sami MiettinenTuomas MalinenGNS Economics
2020-10-26 · Society · Tools · EN
Second Nature Security CTO Juho Ranta unpacks the Vastaamo data breach and extortion while it was still unfolding: what white hat and black hat actually mean, why Tor and bitcoin are double-edged in the same way, and why you should neither pay the extortionist nor read the leaked files. The episode also covers common misunderstandings about GDPR, password practice and two-factor authentication, the three identifiers of which only two can be changed, and why security has to be run on the business's terms rather than by staring at a single system.
NegotiatorEP42Sami MiettinenJuho Ranta2NS
2020-10-17 · Society · Economy · EN
Huuki Show host and political history student Manolis Huuki walks through the birth of the American federation: taxation without representation, the Articles of Confederation, the quarrel between federalists and anti-federalists, the three-fifths compromise and the federal debt that took off after the Civil War. The second half applies all of it to the European Union. The sharpest observation is numerical: US federal and state government together run at around 30 per cent of GDP, while Finland alone is at 42 — so copying a Hamiltonian moment would mean moving taxes to Brussels and cutting the rate, not building a new layer on top.
NegotiatorEP40Sami MiettinenManolis HuukiFederalism
2020-10-10 · Tools · Society · EN
Aaro Huttunen, host of the Saavutus podcast, appears in a twin episode covering individual goal-setting and the self-improvement literature behind it. Along the way: Risto Siilasmaa's paranoid optimism as corporate scenario analysis, the success laws of Brian Tracy and Jari Sarasvuo, Tony Robbins's pain-and-pleasure anchoring, NLP's eye-movement theory and how much to trust it, Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad, and biohacking in Finnish conditions. Running through it is Huttunen's principle: every episode has to leave the listener something concrete they can actually use.
NegotiatorEP39Sami MiettinenAaro HuttunenSaavutus
2020-10-01 · Economy · Society · EN
GNS Economics CEO Tuomas Malinen explains why the firm's latest Q-review contained no positive scenario at all for the first time: the options are collapse, reset and great inflation. A European banking crisis has become the baseline. Malinen unpicks why record-low junk bond yields cannot coexist with record-high large corporate bankruptcies unless a central bank has broken the pricing mechanism, and why debt-financed stimulus in an over-indebted economy creates the conditions for a debt crisis. The second half covers the public clash between the Finnish government and business leaders, what corporate social responsibility actually means, and the quality of the debate over the EU recovery fund.
NegotiatorEP38Sami MiettinenTuomas MalinenGNS Economics
2020-09-09 · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen's former Royal Bank of Scotland colleague Sanjeev Kumar, based in Singapore, traces his path from running RBS's global corporate advisory business through MUFG to a new chapter — and explains why he joined the global advisory board of pinBox Solutions. pinBox builds digital micro-pension systems for low-income workers, especially women and the non-salaried: live in Rwanda and Kenya, just launched in India. The conversation compares Finland's collective pension system with Singapore's personal-account model, works through the allocation problem in defined-contribution schemes, and lands on why longevity, financial inclusion and impact investing make finance more interesting after the global financial crisis than it was before it.
NegotiatorEP36Sami MiettinenSanjeev KumarpinBox Solutions
2020-08-24 · Society · Economy · EN
Vesa Kanniainen, emeritus professor of economics, examines Finland's permanent security deficit and why he considers EU membership one of the most significant post-war security decisions the country has made — even though he is best known as a euro critic. The episode covers a game-theoretic reading of the YYA treaty, the NATO option and the price of exercising it as shared responsibility for the Baltics, the costs of the common currency and the parallel-currency idea, and Kanniainen's work at the boundary of morality and economics from Adam Smith to Vernon Smith.
2020-08-20 · Economy · Society · EN
Tere Sammallahti of the think tank Libera asks why Finnish tax debate always aims at the peak of the Laffer curve and never at collecting as little tax as possible. The conversation covers the problem of cherry-picked comparison periods in economic argument, the scale of transfers and Gini figures, a three-dimensional political coordinate system, universally binding collective agreements and the position of the non-unionised worker, and taxing externalities as a way to fund lower taxes on work.
2020-08-12 · Economy · Society · EN
An English-language episode in which Tuomas Malinen sets out the mechanics of the recovery fund for an international audience. A EUR 750 billion package split into EUR 390 billion of grants and EUR 360 billion of loans, allocated on population, GDP per capita and unemployment from 2015-2019 - variables with nothing to do with the pandemic. Malinen names two treaty articles he considers broken, sorts the euro countries into beneficiaries and losers by GDP per capita, and walks through GnS Economics' synthetic markka simulation, which suggests Finnish exports would have been some 40 per cent higher with an own currency. He closes with one concrete demand: a referendum on the recovery fund in every member state.
NegotiatorEP31Sami MiettinenTuomas MalinenRecovery fund
2020-08-06 · Economy · Society · EN
Tuomas Malinen of GnS Economics walks through the structure of the EU recovery fund and argues it is a permanent transfer mechanism rather than a one-off crisis measure: the allocation criteria do not correlate with Covid, the EU borrows directly into member-state budgets for the first time, and the balanced-budget requirement of Article 310 is bypassed. The conversation covers the German constitutional court's ultra vires ruling, the scale of Italy's debt, the arithmetic of Finland's negotiated outcome, and the case for a referendum.
2020-08-03 · Economy · Society · EN
Mika Maliranta, research professor at the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority, explains why firms exist at all (the Coase theorem), where the line runs between vertical and horizontal integration, and how natural monopolies are regulated. The second half takes up Acemoğlu and Robinson's institutional theory, The Narrow Corridor and Hayek: why good institutions are not adopted even when they are well known, why some institution always fills the gap — the mafia included — and why the Nordic model and earnings-related unemployment insurance actually encourage risk-taking.
2020-06-19 · Economy · Society · EN
Tuomas Malinen of GnS Economics and Sami Miettinen revisit the three scenarios they set out in their book on the euro's future six years earlier: zombification through the ECB's balance sheet, a move to federation, and fragmentation of the euro area. Malinen reads the pandemic as a classic asymmetric shock being explained away as a symmetric one, and argues the EU has moved onto a path that breaches its own treaties in both the recovery fund and the ECB's pandemic programme. The episode covers the Karlsruhe court's deadline for the Bundesbank, Finland's hidden contingent liabilities, and why a floating currency works as a countercyclical safety valve. It closes with Malinen's pointed promise about leaving the euro and a scenario in which the recovery package fails in national parliaments.
2020-06-18 · Economy · Society · EN
Tuomas Malinen of GnS Economics and Sami Miettinen work slide by slide through the most common misconceptions about an independent currency and an EU federation. The episode shows that Finnish interest rates were not exceptionally high during the markka era once the currency floated, and that the rate spike came from defending a fixed exchange rate rather than from having one's own money. The discussion presents the GnS simulation of how the markka would have moved during the euro years and its countercyclical effect, and compares US federal tax levels with the EU equivalent. It closes on Puerto Rico's debt restructuring, the broken no-bailout principle, and where a federation's ten-point tax increase would come from.
2020-06-01 · Society · Tools · EN
Sami Miettinen is a guest on Futucast, hosted by William von der Pahlen and Isak Rautio, in a conversation about what unedited long-form talk does to public debate. The episode opens up the Overton window and the risk that a society's consensus drifts badly out of line with reality when the range of the discussable is never widened. The discussion sets identity politics — judging a claim by which box the speaker fits — against Ray Dalio's believability weighting, where a track record on that specific subject earns the hearing. The sharpest observation concerns institutions: inside a bank, a party or an agency every sentence is read as the institution's position, leaving only entrepreneurs and the not-yet-hired free to speak.
2020-02-21 · Society · Economy · EN
Doctoral researcher Antti Ronkainen unpacks the mechanics of identity politics as the megatrend of political influence: why Boris Johnson won with a single identity while Corbyn's Labour leaked in every direction, how Fukuyama's thymos and the white worker explain Trump's rise, what Krastev and Piketty reveal about imitation and the left's gentrification, and why identity politics is a 'cage of democracy.' Featuring the Overton window, the 'Frankfurt School' myth, Bloomberg's micro-targeting, and the crisis of Finland's and Kokoomus's center-right.
NeuvottelijaEPSami MiettinenAntti RonkainenIdentity Politics
2020-02-03 · Economy · Society · EN
Rami Kurimo puts a negotiation author and an ownership author in the same room and asks whether you can negotiate your way to a million. What comes out is a two-part conversation: the four levers of negotiation and the team roles nobody bothers to agree before walking into the room, and then the distinction Luoma draws between an owner and an investor — the owner is the one who has to negotiate. Underneath both sits the same Finnish problem: too little private capital and too few owners.
Sami MiettinenTero LuomaRami KurimoPuheenaiheNegotiation
2019-10-31 · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and Sam Laakso on Puheenaihe in October 2019, at the tail of what was then the longest expansion in American history and one of the weakest by average growth. The argument that carries the episode is about pegs: a gold standard rebalances itself, but the mechanism breaks when a local currency is tied one-to-one to an international settlement currency while labour markets stay rigid — which is precisely the euro's defect. Also covered: the policy rate as a deliberate choice, Russia's digital gold-backed currency, Libra as an SDR-like basket, the scale of crypto, and housing.