---
title: "The Capital Shortage Holding Finland Back — Sami Miettinen on Puheenaihe"
titleOriginal: "\"Pääomien puute estää Suomen talouskasvun\" (Sami Miettinen) | Puheenaihe 618"
description: "Sami Miettinen with Puheenaihe host Leevi Leivo on why Finland has no private capital to build companies with: a median household with too little to invest, €270bn of pension money that logically goes abroad and large, the YEL entrepreneur-pension mess nobody will fix, and what he actually does with his own portfolio — cash weight, tariffs, the dollar, bitcoin and gold."
format: "podcast"
show: "Puheenaihe"
episode: "618"
hosts: ["Leevi Leivo"]
date: 2025-08-29
duration: "1:07:00"
language: "fi"
original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFw4jFfbx_M
relatedEpisode: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/465-neuvotteluklubi-tech-bros-rautio-leivo-omar-neuvottelija-302/
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/puheenaihe-618-finland-lacks-capital/
---

# The Capital Shortage Holding Finland Back — Sami Miettinen 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

- **0:00** — The investment banking business
- **4:42** — The capital shortage
- **8:46** — Pension funds
- **15:51** — Where the Finnish economy stands
- **20:33** — The YEL catastrophe
- **27:30** — Regressive pension contributions
- **30:26** — Equity markets
- **33:10** — Interest rates
- **40:12** — The dollar's position
- **52:15** — Cash weight in the portfolio
- **56:37** — Bitcoin and gold
- **1:01:17** — Sami's podcasting career

**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](/media/puheenaihe-44-international-monetary-system/).
Leevi Leivo has also appeared on the Neuvottelija channel, in
[the Tech Bros negotiation club](https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/465-neuvotteluklubi-tech-bros-rautio-leivo-omar-neuvottelija-302/).

Original recording (Puheenaihe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFw4jFfbx_M

From the same session: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/465-neuvotteluklubi-tech-bros-rautio-leivo-omar-neuvottelija-302/

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, guest on Puheenaihe 618 — The Capital Shortage Holding Finland Back — Sami Miettinen on Puheenaihe, 2025-08-29, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFw4jFfbx_M. Record: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/puheenaihe-618-finland-lacks-capital/.