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Podcast · Puheenaihe 618 · 2025-08-29 · 1:07:00 · In Finnish

The Capital Shortage Holding Finland Back — Sami Miettinen on Puheenaihe

Published as “"Pääomien puute estää Suomen talouskasvun" (Sami Miettinen) | Puheenaihe 618”

Hosted by: Leevi Leivo

▶ Watch on Puheenaihe

Sami Miettinen’s first solo appearance on Puheenaihe after many panel visits, with host Leevi Leivo, on the thing he keeps coming back to: Finland does not have the private capital to build companies with, and almost every mechanism that could create some points the other way.

The arithmetic is the argument. Take a Finnish household with roughly €150,000 in assets against one with half a million: past the first €150,000 or so, everything could reasonably sit in equities — and for the half-million household it does, mostly in America. Below that there is nothing left to invest after the flat, which makes founding a company without capital very hard and bootstrapping the only route. Sitting beside this is a €270bn pension complex whose managers, entirely logically, want large foreign targets; forcing them into small domestic ones is a different proposition than it sounds. Sami’s own structure — a holding company with private equity fund units and direct holdings in listed and unlisted companies — needs hundreds of thousands to make sense. If you have €30,000 after the flat, the rational move is an index fund, preferably globally diversified and not concentrated in Helsinki. He points at Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill baby investment accounts as the kind of mechanism that would actually create capital.

The YEL section is the angriest. Entrepreneurs’ pensions were never funded, which leaves the state carrying a €600m expense, and the fix has been handed to a vague working group that has been thinking about it for a year. His broader point is that the tripartite model is not a market economy — and that having been responsible for his own pension made him a considerably better owner and investor, because he thinks about the risks continuously. Most Finns have outsourced exactly that to the pension collective and never develop the habit.

The second half is markets and his own book: why a policy rate above four per cent against Europe’s two was strange to begin with, why 15% tariffs are survivable in a continent with 25.5% VAT (the logistics chain broke on pre-buying instead), why a weak dollar is partly just the rate normalising and may reverse, and why the US — with exports under a fifth of its economy — is not a mercantilist export economy the way Finland is. Taleb’s antifragility gets applied to Finnish industry: pull the subsidy and the e-bike companies fall over. On his own portfolio he is specific: around €20,000 idle went into Nordea and Wärtsilä on a ten per cent dip; he has held bitcoin since it was €6,000 and wishes he had held more; and he now tells people to use an exchange-traded tracker rather than repeat his own mistake — his coins sit on Coinbase behind an expired passport and a work email he left years ago.

Chapters

The recording lives on Puheenaihe’s own channel and they own it. This page is a record of the appearance and a pointer to the original, not a copy of it. Timestamps follow the chapter marks Puheenaihe published with the episode, which was recorded on 25 August 2025.

The closing section looks back at where these views came from, including the first appearance on Ivan Puopolo’s show and the monetary-system conversation with Sam Laakso. Leevi Leivo has also appeared on the Neuvottelija channel, in the Tech Bros negotiation club.

From the same session: Neuvottelija's own episode

Topics: Ownership, Capital & Tax · Finnish Economy & Policy · Investing & Markets · ← All media visits · Talks & Events · Markdown mirror: index.md