Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing retirees in Thailand. A recent comment on our channel got me thinking, I decided to go ahead and make a video. Quoting directly: "Some people just can't accept that Thailand's goal is to get "high dollar" retirees. The Average Joe is not going to see any concessions. Each "high dollar" retiree can replace 10 or 20 Average Joes, so bye-bye." 

It is an interesting question, and people have, I notice the Expat community has been throwing this back and forth as to what do you do with this issue. I keep thinking of the film Moneyball with Brad Pitt where this baseball team, it doesn't have a lot of money and so it looks for these statistical ways to make up for talent in the aggregate. So in a sense Thailand is playing Moneyball wherein at one time they had high volume and definitely now there is no volume but what they are looking to bring in is these high value retirees. Also there seems to be and I suspect especially as hopefully these pandemic measures come to an end sooner rather than later, there is going to be more of a desire to just get capital flowing in the country and tourists flowing in the country and people coming in. I don't suspect we are going to see stringent measures against retirees; that is my speculation but it would make some sense especially if you look at the aftermath of '97 and the roughly 10 years following that, the overall paradigm was "hey if they have got money, let's not try to keep people out, let's try to get people in; get that money in to help buoy the economy." I suspect we will see something similar although who knows, it remains to be seen.

In a sense I think that what is going on right now is policymakers are trying to replace numbers with folks that have higher net worth. I don't know if that is going to work from an economic standpoint. For example, just because folks are an “Average Joe”, more volume means more money. A high net worth individual can only eat so many times a day for example, whereas if you have got 10 “Average Joes”, that eat three times a day that is 30 meals. If you have one high net worth individual that is three meals. If you are doing this to inject velocity or inject activity in the economy, my thinking would be you would want volume; not necessarily quality, you would want quantity. That said, people can reasonably disagree on that and I guess presently the overarching thinking is towards high-end folks.

Now bear in mind I do believe that will change and I believe that right now if a number of “Average Joes” wanted to come to Thailand, the tourism sector etc., even the Immigration apparatus would be more than enthusiastic to have those folks come in. Unfortunately right now they just have to deal with all of the protocols associated with the pandemic.