I wonder how we can get away with constantly having to compensate state victims. Obviously in many ways, but now I would like to focus on one aspect.
The compensation tickets of the 1990s were meant to console the victims of the forty-year party state. Did they take your land or your company in 1946? You will now receive a compensation ticket, with which you can then buy yourself state land or a company. Let’s say OTP or MOL. It sounded good on paper, but in practice, it turned out that the injured parties wasted their tickets, and only hyenas who bought shares got rich from them – 15-20 percent of the tickets were never used.
Zsolt Balásy, portfolio manager of HOLD Fund Management and MON After Hours its host writes in the upcoming HVG360, “Capitalism with Balásy” newsletter.
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This is the newsletter first on April 22, 2026 appeared.
And it looks like they will never be again – on January 7, 2025, the Budapest Stock Exchange (BÉT) deleted from your product list the compensation tickets.
But what will happen now?
This memory did not occur to me by chance. After all, we once again had (!) a party state and it has victims. For example, people who wrested their companies out of their hands by indirectly or directly using the power of the state. Just like the socialist state. The big difference is that, in principle, socialism harmed individuals for the benefit of the public (well, that worked well too), while NER did it for its own benefit. In practice, I can express this by saying that in socialism there were no individuals who got rich at the expense of the public.
Let’s not call the party secretary’s vacation home enrichment if the contrast is the gas fitter or the Orbán family.
BIZTOS owns the property, and OTP is seven hundredfold
In Hungarian popular belief, “Investment” is real estate, and the stock market is a game of chance. The big psychological difference is that we buy real estate for the long term and are not confronted with exchange rates every day – we only hear about the stock market during crashes. Even if we didn’t look at the price of the shares and bought them for the long term! says our mantra. Suddenly, I looked at what would have happened if someone had bought OTP shares from their compensation ticket on the occasion of the first stock market issue in 1994, and not the unfortunately more popular municipal apartment – and would still hold it today, because they wouldn’t look at the exchange rate.
The OTP owner, including dividends, made seven hundred times his money, which is an annual return of 24 percent. In 1994, an average apartment in a residential complex in Budapest cost around HUF 3 million. Even after adding the rental fees, this has only increased by a maximum of forty times since then. Of course, OTP was our most successful listed company, but the apartment as an investment was the only one that crushed Matáv among the big ones: Matáv increased sixteen-fold, Mol seventy-fold, Richter one hundred and sixty-fold, and OTP seven-hundred-fold. However, you can only live in real estate, that’s true.
How can the above-mentioned problem be solved? The compensation ticket to be issued now would not be paid from state assets, but from NER assets. Of course, the careers/lives lost in sixteen years cannot be compensated, but neither was it possible after socialism. This is again similar in the two states.
Obviously, this all makes no sense. I don’t know exactly why there isn’t, but there isn’t. So I’m just glad that I could write all of this now without worry. You still have to get used to it. And I wonder how we can get away with constantly having to compensate state victims. Obviously in many ways, but now I would like to focus on one aspect.
The intoxication of hatred
The completely incompetent Patriot put out one my videoin which I talk about how much damage Fidesz did with the price caps. That it is a drug to which the population has become accustomed. I am baffled that the world hasn’t turned around so much that even the Patriot is now supporting Fidesz and has been doing so for the past sixteen years. Then I realized. The Patriot scolds drug addicts by taking away their drugs. They experience this as a negative for some reason.
There are two worlds and a gap between them. Unbroken. This should be improved.
Here is this Our country withdrawal. Which most likely meant Joy mode. But that doesn’t whip up enough emotions, so it became “Our Country is withdrawing because of the Roma children”. Why? Because the reader is drawn to it, clicks on it, and the media serves it, because it wants clicks. I don’t know where this vicious circle can be broken, but man can program himself. If, upon seeing such a title, you don’t click enthusiastically, but turn away in disgust at being incited again, the world will soon be a better place.
A peculiar inclusivity
I hope I am not telling many people anything new by saying that the playing of the Gypsy anthem at the opening of the Parliament was not meant for the Roma. It doesn’t help them. It was addressed to those left-wing voters who believe that this will make it better for the Roma and that it will be less of a problem to vote for a right-wing party.
Flashing clocks
We still remember the time when NER wives in single-use t-shirts costing hundreds of thousands of forints appeared on TV? Or for flashy multi-million dollar watches? Which everyone enthusiastically uncovered, because of our money? Well, they were obviously intentional. They intend to harass. Let the trenches be deeper, the expert camps be more distant. Let’s tear society apart even more so that we can stay in power.
There is the Cicero idea that it is not enough to be decent, one must also appear to be decent. This was reversed by the NER: it is not enough to be a thief, you also have to look like one.
To say goodbye in the words of another American president: “Look not at what your country can do for you, but at what you can do for your country!” I’ll tell you what you can do: you don’t participate in rummaging, i.e. digging ditches. Anyone dig it.
Zsolt Balásythe other writings and reviews of HOLD’s portfolio manager you can browse here on HOLDBLOG.
This is an opinion article that does not necessarily reflect the position of HOLD Fund Management and the editorial staff of HOLDBLOG.
