Investment funds cash level decreasing with new contributions/share profits

"The part of the investment fund that is being restructured is the cash part, largely originating from contributions by the population, less the amounts paid to workers and the major contributions, coming from interest."

or

1. "The part of the investment fund that is being restructured is the cash part....coming from interest"

If you mean to say the dividends now have a negative effect on the cash level of the fund, this is correct.

2. " largely originating from contributions by the population"

This is not true for those that work on their funds. Dividends account for 2 or 3 times the amount added to the cash level of the funds compared to worker contributions for most of my funds.

3. "Interest should be set to zero or lower as it does not come from any investment made by the fund but it is paid by the gamemaster. "

Interest should be paid by the magical World Bank at rates somewhat lower than it itself loans out. Would it not make sense that this is the source of the funds the World Bank has available to loan out rather than some non-game generated source?

4. "Also, most of the cash originates from the time money was worthless. "

Can you define this time period. My account is from 12-2012. When was money worthless? Is it worthless now?

5. "There is no way to mix these funds with the country cash, it was never the case. "

How simple do we want to make this game? Of course I have ways to influence a balance of country funds and investment funds. I choose when and at what value to IPO corps. I choose tax rates and profit sharing. I can sell shares from different countries and enterprises to funds at any time at prices high or low. I made choices to grow my funds before any GM declared that fund's cash was worthless.

6. "Nobody lost any 40T here. and no fund should have 40T in the first place. "

How about some notice? I would have made different decisions. Anything else I should know coming that might effect game-play?

At least with weapons and ammo, I got some notice before gradual decreases in their value. If I paid $15 million each for weapons that now cost $10 million, would you say I lost $5 million/weapon? Again, This change had the benefit of notice and being a gradual change. I changed my game-play to compensate and did not feel blindsided. The change to funds had neither of those things.

7. "We will zero the interest paid by the gamemaster. "

Good. Take away the free money the "World Bank" has to lend and have it pay the interest to the funds for the rights to lend their cash.

8. "All these amounts, adding and subtracting is quite confusing to most players"

Welfare index, running corps, and taking a level 2 C3 is confusing to most players. It's a good thing some experienced players are interested in growing the game and spend their time helping these players. Your welcome.

9. "The fund will either remain insignificant, and side tracked as it was until now or it can be restructured and get a real part to play. "

Side track it has my vote over this. Go ahead and take my side track vote to any other change that takes my stuff without notice.


10. "The only good thing to do with this money is to purchase shares. This will of course remain as it always has been. more incentives to do so can help"

So, the funds buy shares, they earn dividends which are then deducted from the available cash of the funds. How long can that last? This is the global effect that I was referring to earlier.


Alright back to this one

"Nobody lost any 40T here. and no fund should have 40T in the first place."

Maybe I should ask what I should have because this did not seem unusual to me. My main had $56.68 Trillion in cash alone the last time I counted and my funds on LU totaled $214.39 Trillion in cash from a total of $442.22 Trillion in value.

I just counted $655 Trillion in country and enterprise cash/loans right now. Should I have that?

I have $715 Trillion in military assets counted from the finance pages. This is before quality so, conservatively, it comes to some $2000 Trillion+ after quality. Should I have that?

Please tell me what I should have and what I should do with the rest.

Thank you

--------------------------------------------

Now for a better idea. Why don't you consider providing an option to allow players to spend their built up funds for a real benefit? The premise is these funds don't do anything.

Allow the players who want to keep their worthless funds to do so with the way things work now and allow other players to trade in their funds to purchase things, whether it is some conversion to gold coins, game money, population, or whatever.

Be creative. This allows the GM to estimate his value of removing these funds from the game world versus the player's own valuation of those funds. The store could be a limited time option before some detailed, community-discussed, announced well-ahead of time, awesome, new features in the future.

Just, until then, at least, give me the option to keep my funds, my cash, and the dividends that I worked and planned for.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

We will zero the interest paid by the gamemaster.
we will discuss the possibility of a negative interest rate or leave it at zero.
-Andy<!-/Quote-!>

i get the hint, i'll stop talking before you take away my birthday

The statements above are largely incorrect.

There are some changes expected in these funds:

1. The world bank is not interested in the money. It takes loans when it needs them but the funds money is not part of it. There is no reason to pay any interest on this money and inject useless (or any other) money into the game and distort the cash flow.

2. The contribution of the population are too high. More should be spent on products, and less given to the funds. They are swamped in huge unused amounts. This is money that is taken out of the world cash into the funds.

3. The contributions of the funds to the people who have paid their money in the past, are far too small. These amounts will increase.

4. Funds will receive less from the populations, and pay back more. They have income from dividend and can increase their income, by making sure their money is invested in shares.

Money sitting in the fund will not earn anything. Money put in the stock market may earn dividend or increase/decrease in value.

5. Some funds will remain cash positive, earning more than they are paying. Some may pay out more than their income. we might later add some level of choice for the fund to raise or reduce such payments.

6. Funds that are becoming cash negative, will sell some of their share holdings, or reduce their payments to the workers.

7. The page explaining the funds will be improved and will show all the data that is relevant to the fund.

The changes that are needed to implement all this will start kicking in in the coming weeks.

The separation between the money of the state and the fund remains as it was.
Added income as a result of larger payments to the workers is not a major benefit to the country but rather a boost for the world market.

Plans to create a closer relation between the funds and countries, possible financial support by the fund to a failing economy etc. will remain on our wish list but are deferred to a later point in time.

Andy, you have taken money from our investment fund cash fund. I do not agree with you that most of this cash was generated when "cash was worthless', I worked hard to generate this money.

I understand your rational for doing this, however some warning would have been polite to your customers before you start taking cash from their investment fund.

I still don't understand what benefit you got from that fund. It was basically a monetary black hole, that ate cash and never gave it back. Everything Andy has said about it tracks with what I was aware of, so it didn't change while I was gone. Also, very little of what you guys have said makes any sense.

Either you guys didn't understand what you were doing, which I don't beleive, or you had some other nefarious thing going on that you don't want to talk about. I mean I can beleive that one of you got all bored one day and started playing the stock market. But there is no way all of you were, unless you were getting something out of it. Quite few things that have been said even directly imply you were benefitting somehow.

Your not going to have any sympathy as long as your evasive about it. This was a simple improvement to the game, you had to know whatever you were doing would be subject to game improvements. But you can't expect W3C to not break something they weren't aware of.

interesting isn't it, hymy? that made me chuckle, in one breath Andy said the IFs where useless, then in the next explained why large IFs are valuable, and you missed it

anyways, in reference to my ever decreasing IF, whats the target goal cash level for these funds, andy? that is, how low do that have to go, before they stop decreasing?

also andy, i see where your going with this, i think

it sounds like the pay out to the pop, will be based on dividends, instead of that increasing the fund. the fund will increase based on pop contributions. un-invested money, will have a zero, or a negative effect.

if i've got this right(?) this is a positive change

i'm still disappointed from my lump of cash just being deleted, but your change sounds very good, i can already think how this will be much more beneficial, various settings i can change to manipulate this to a greater advantage than my 90T coulda done

@hymy

It is possible to extract money from the investment fund by buying shares from your CEO company. Meanwhile the cash was earning some interest. Long term investment and a store of wealth.

but anyway...

My gripe is that we were not given sufficient warning or time to allocate our cash before it started to be stripped from us. And no mention of compensation.

The fund was set up to make sure some money goes into the share market. Investment funds trade automatically according to some rules and make sure we have an active share market.

without the funds, the share market would not work as the number of manual transactions is too small.

The error in the procedure is that money came in, for a long time, and ended up sitting there as unused cash.
Money going out was a tiny fraction of the income.

Except for this, funds are a marginal function and for now will remain so although we will try to move them from irrelevance, to something with more common sense.

To discard false claims, it should be clear that nobody earned any substantial amounts of money in the fund. It varies from zero in most cases, to a small percentage in other cases.
Certainly the president did little to get money into the fund.

If anyone, these are workers who put some of their salaries in the fund instead of buying new cars for themselves.

Most of the money came from the gamemaster.

The upcoming change will end the gamemaster funding.
It will also end the endless taking of money from the workers while giving them nearly nothing in return, and using the money to build a fund that does not do what it should.

The fund should give more money back to the investors.

The cash is not going away and there is no need to warn you months in advance.
The fund will keep the cash but to make a profit, it will have to invest the cash in shares.

Funds do not need to make money from the gamemaster while sitting on their hands.

Making money with the funds will depend on the capabilities of the president to make money in the stock market.

A good fund will pay more to the workers in the country.
This remains a marginal advantage as the money is not necessarily being used by the workers, in the country itself.

We might add an index that is related to the profitability of the fund.

We will not have a negative interest rate yet.
If funds will not invest, we will need a more powerful tool to make them either invest or the money will dissolve slowly with a negative interest rate.
Cash in funds may also decline as a result of larger payments to the workers in the country.
I assume everyone will love the workers to have more money.

We just need to make sure this will not create large shortages on the markets as the money will be used to purchase products.

Income from taxes will not be influenced as the fund pays net amounts.

'Certainly the president did little to get money into the fund. '

wrong

'it should be clear that nobody earned any substantial amounts of money in the fund. It varies from zero in most cases, to a small percentage in other cases. '

is not consistent with

'Most of the money came from the gamemaster. '

'The cash is not going away and there is no need to warn you months in advance.'

wrong

look at my investment funds, losing cash monthly.

Andy

Can you answer my previous question many post ago,

why is the money in my investment fund disappearing?

Thannks claude, for being clear about that.

The funds might loose much more money as we move on.
They will have to pay their investors serious money.

Funds that will not invest, will make losses.
Start putting the money to work ASAP.

Andy, It is very disappointing to see you treating us this way.
While I understand your intentions, for me it is a matter of principle. Your actions show me little respect for the time and money I have invested in the game. Don't expect my support any longer.

No problem.

We will make the investment fund an active part of the game.

I fail to see where a president has any value attached to the fund.
you can do nothing at all with the money in the fund. It was never yours and unusable for the president. It has always been this way.

Now, after this change, much more money will flow from the fund to the citizens of the country.

This must sound like a real disaster and misuse of "well earned funds".

If you want to sit on the unusable money gained from GM "interest" and gain more unusable money without doing anything, this is the wrong game for you.

Reread my explanation.
I fail to see how anyone could think that this is a bad feature for the game.

Not a very important one but in any case, not damaging anyone.

I am not arguing that the reforms aren't good Andy. It is about time.

It is your failure to understand that taking money from an account that I worked to build without any warning is quite offensive.

At first I thought it was a game error. Such time has passed that large quantities of cash have been taken from my accounts. Now you tell us to use it or lose it. I am a little busy at the moment and don't really have the time to deal with you forcing my hand.

Your failure to 'see where a president has any value attached to the fund' is the problem here. You are taking money from me that I worked hard to generate. What is so hard to understand about that?

I can access investment fund cash by IPO'ing my CEO owned companies, selling 80% of them to my investment funds and in doing so raising the individual corp to a Q250 productivity and efficiency and extracting money from the investment fund to my CEO account. Most often I would buy undervalued shares from you (the gamemaster CEO account).

The money in the fund is mine because I sold shares that I bought for a pittance into my investment fund and managed these corps with my CEO, built the companies up, and sold them for a huge profit for my investment fund.

There is no disaster or misuse here except your blindness to my point of view.

The pissy little amount of GM 'interest' equates to a pretty minor part of the 170T I had amassed in one of my funds. And so what if it is just sitting there. It is not like I am spending my whole day playing this game striving to employ all my resources at every moment. I had alway thought of this a long term game.

when you say it was never our funds, thats kinda a loose way to justify taking them,

i can adjust my tax rates, to increase the profit pay outs into my IFs, rather than into my countries general fund, its a diversion of money that i choose to make, it is my money, money i choose to put into the IFs, rather than into my direct trading

I agree with the last few posts here. I run 0% tax in 6 of my 9 countries on LU to pay additional dividends to my funds. This unannounced change that was not addressed on this thread for two weeks changes my game-play.

I still don't know exactly where my funds cash is going. Is this going to citizens? It does not appear so.

Orbiter,
you cannot influence the payments into the fund. They are part of the income of workers, depending on which group it is.

We are not taking any of your money away, the money away, the money from the fund, is paid to the workers.
it will become visible in the coming days, on the page describing the fund.

Great to have some animated discussion on the forum.
The GMs love it.

This one is about nothing, but who cares?

Andy,

lol, By raising wages you can increase payments into the fund,
Unless you have recently changed this.


How can 200B per game month be paid to workers?

Yes, Andy 200B per game month from each fund.

Can you read this?

Can you look at my game account and check?

It would have to be a very well invested funded to withstand that kind of payout.

Ah,
Now you are showing some numbers and reason.

200B is unreasonable.
raising salaries?
the last reason for that is income for the fund.
and the influence of the salaries is small. Other results of higher salaries are much more significant. to really increase input to the fund, you need to increase salaries to unreasonable levels. your corporations will die.

and for what? as I said, the money is not yours. you cannot mix it with the country funds.

when the change is made this week, the numbers will make sense.

We will have to set it to some initial percentage and then look at results in many countries and tune it in the first days it runs.

by the end of the coming week, I hope to have it all done.