On Tuesday the long-awaited competitiveness pact was finally signed by trade unions and employers. All the papers covered the event, with Iltalehti leading with a double page spread on the official signing ceremony.
Their photo of the signatories included Vuokko Piekkala, who represents the Lutheran Church--an interesting and noticeable addition to the normally pale, male and middle-aged leaders who have been holding press events on the topic for the past year.
The paper also reports that the SAK, the blue-collar trade union confederation, says the deal is hard for its members to swallow.
Solar panels pay off
Helsingin Sanomat has a big report on solar energy, interviewing a Vantaa resident who has spent 11,000 euros fitting out his house with equipment to harness the sun's energy. Kari Välimäki says he's done the sums and the setup will have paid for itself in 8 to 10 years.
The paper has a checklist for those interested in doing similar, and speculates on the future of solar energy. It is particularly profitable, HS claims, for those who use energy in the summer. Solar possibilities are somewhat limited in the Finnish winter, but on an annual basis the south of the country has similar potential to northern Germany.
That is great for people like Välimäki, who needs to heat his swimming pool in the winter, and for people with a cabin in the woods. That is perhaps the most popular type of Finnish holiday, so it is advice that may be heeded. Solar is cheaper, according to HS, than hooking up your forest hideaway to the electricity grid.
The best tip they offer, however, is to buy a battery to store the energy for when you need it. In the Finnish climate, you cannot rely on the sun to shine when you need electricity--and large-capacity household batteries are getting cheaper all the time.
Investments murkier than betting?
Kauppalehti has a big spread on investment options, asking whether they have become too complicated for retail customers to understand. The regulator Fiva says that investigations into abuses of investment instruments have more than tripled in ten years, leading to suspicions that the instruments themselves are too complex and offer too much scope for misunderstanding.
KL has the genius idea of interviewing betting expert Jorma Vuoksenmaa (who launched a new book on betting strategies last Friday) who offers the provocative view that sports betting is a more honest industry than investing, and that financial services professionals on Helsinki's Aleksanterinkatu differ from bookies only in that they 'wear better ties'.
'Junk bonds' are sold to consumers as 'high yield' investments, prompting unrealistic expectations and making risk management more difficult, according to Vuoksenmaa. That critique is answered by Jan Forsbom of Front wealth management, who says that many of his peers don't wear ties at all and more of them work in Vallila, in the eastern part of central Helsinki, than on the fancy Aleksanterinkatu addresses referenced by Vuoksenmaa.
More seriously he does say that betting is exciting but also rife with bribery and corruption, and that not every investment product suits every customer--the most important thing is to understand what you are buying.