by elaken » Fri Sep 18, 2020 10:01 pm
communist wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 6:08 am
I agree with this. I reached a point where i was able to purchase entire blocks of US Treasury bonds, i had the money, but i was unwilling to hold Ctrl+Shift+RMB for the few minutes that it would require.
They've moved this around a lot in beta and I'm not very please with where they landed. Essentially after not-very-long in the game, bonds become a pain in the ass.
1) If you want to buy bonds (and given your options, why would you do this?) - You have to keep buying the same small quantity of treasury bonds (and remember to re-purchase when they mature). There are usually no / minimal corporate bonds to buy, so it eventually becomes an exercise of doing a lot of micromanagement work for minimal gain. Especially once you take inflation into account, it's always better to buy global stocks than mess around with bonds - even though bonds are a much larger market in the real world. Long ago I proposed global corporate bonds (presumably with some risk of default, but higher yields), but that never happened.
2) Somewhere along the way (last 1-2 updates) they put a $1B cap on the bonds you can issue. So if you want to raise $50B in bonds you need to click the button 50X. This amount of micromanagement makes them super annoying, and the AI players will automatically re-issue bonds to cover maturities. If, for example I want to build a bunch of real estate: I always create a subsidiary and issue short term bonds, relying on the AI to handle the maturity roll (I similarly must rely on AI bankers to get cash out of the bank consistently because those options are not available the player corp).
3) The micromanagement issues could be solved with some sort of "rolling purchase" / "rolling sale" functionality that could be conducted by (for example) the office the CFO (which would give that function an actual purpose). If you don't mind rate volatility, I'd far rather automatically re-issue $x of 1-year bonds (at the then prevailing market rate) than issue 10-yrs at higher rates. Where it's an option I often end up just paying ~5% more for the longer term debt than dealing with having to manually reissue 10-20 bonds every game year. Not because it's good economics, but because the alternative is annoying as hell.
[quote=communist post_id=33968 time=1599199696 user_id=6481]
I agree with this. I reached a point where i was able to purchase entire blocks of US Treasury bonds, i had the money, but i was unwilling to hold Ctrl+Shift+RMB for the few minutes that it would require.
[/quote]
They've moved this around a lot in beta and I'm not very please with where they landed. Essentially after not-very-long in the game, bonds become a pain in the ass.
1) If you want to buy bonds (and given your options, why would you do this?) - You have to keep buying the same small quantity of treasury bonds (and remember to re-purchase when they mature). There are usually no / minimal corporate bonds to buy, so it eventually becomes an exercise of doing a lot of micromanagement work for minimal gain. Especially once you take inflation into account, it's always better to buy global stocks than mess around with bonds - even though bonds are a much larger market in the real world. Long ago I proposed global corporate bonds (presumably with some risk of default, but higher yields), but that never happened.
2) Somewhere along the way (last 1-2 updates) they put a $1B cap on the bonds you can issue. So if you want to raise $50B in bonds you need to click the button 50X. This amount of micromanagement makes them super annoying, and the AI players will automatically re-issue bonds to cover maturities. If, for example I want to build a bunch of real estate: I always create a subsidiary and issue short term bonds, relying on the AI to handle the maturity roll (I similarly must rely on AI bankers to get cash out of the bank consistently because those options are not available the player corp).
3) The micromanagement issues could be solved with some sort of "rolling purchase" / "rolling sale" functionality that could be conducted by (for example) the office the CFO (which would give that function an actual purpose). If you don't mind rate volatility, I'd far rather automatically re-issue $x of 1-year bonds (at the then prevailing market rate) than issue 10-yrs at higher rates. Where it's an option I often end up just paying ~5% more for the longer term debt than dealing with having to manually reissue 10-20 bonds every game year. Not because it's good economics, but because the alternative is annoying as hell.
