by ilene - October 29th, 2010 2:11 pm
Courtesy of JOHN RUBINO of Dollar Collapse
The trouble began in the early 1980s, when we baby boomers entered our 30s and began molding the world in our own image. You can graph the spreading darkness from that point, as US debt, the number of government employees, the trade deficit and virtually every other measure of societal pathology inflected upward. Our generation, says James Bacon, a Virginia writer and magazine publisher, will go down in history as the one that ended the American empire — along with the retirement dreams of pretty much everyone everywhere.
Full disclosure: I’ve known Jim Bacon ever since I wrote for one of his magazines back in the 1980s. He was one of my favorite editors, both because he had a light touch and because he almost always saw the real story behind the noise and opinion. So I expected his new book, Boomergeddon to be both easy to read and incisive, and he’s succeed on both counts. Here’s a representative excerpt from the intro:
When you wake up 20 years from now, shaking your head of thinning white hair (those of you who have hair), groping for your bifocals, and feeling all out of sorts because your “golden” years have become as shopworn as cheap costume jewelry, you’ll know whom to blame. Just look in the mirror and take a long hard look at the miscreant who failed to save enough money, despite abundant warnings that retirement would be very, very expensive. Then head to East Capital Street, N.E./ Washington, D.C., where you can accost any member of the 535 members of Congress who, through successive decisions more short-sighted than your own rheumy eyeballs, racked up mountains of debt, presided over the disintegration of the United States retirement safety net, and ruined whatever shot you had at living an old age where the words “happy,” “carefree” and “solvent” applied.
Bacon’s main point early on is that the system has devolved to the point where it no longer matters who’s in charge. Each major party is run by a ruling class of lobbyists, bureaucrats and professional politicians who are beholden to a set of interest groups that demand higher spending and increased money printing. Each side blames the other for the mounting problems, so elections tend to be alternating landslides, as opposition candidates demonize incumbents, are given a chance to…
Tags: baby boomers, Boomergeddon, borrowing, Congress, debt, Economy, Jim Bacon, retirement, risk, savings, spending
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by ilene - October 17th, 2010 8:13 pm
Courtesy of Mish
Because of losses in construction and manufacturing, unemployment has taken its toll on more men than women. Please consider More Wives Head for Work
Angela Patterson is working as an insurance agent in New York while her husband looks for construction jobs in North Carolina. Diana Gomez had been staying home to care for an ill daughter. When her husband lost his job, she became an administrative assistant in a dentist’s office. Michelle, a social worker and mother of three young children in Baltimore, who asked that her last name not be used, switched from part-time to full-time work when her husband was laid off last year. She kept to that schedule after he found work earlier this year—at two-thirds his former salary.
They are the reluctant breadwinners: Women who wanted to stay home until their income suddenly became critical to the well-being of their families. In some cases they are increasing their hours to keep the bills paid. Others are taking up employment for the first time as their husbands struggle to find work. With the anemic recovery keeping the job outlook uncertain, the accelerated gender shift is likely to stick, creating new challenges for U.S. families.
In a study published this September in the journal Family Relations, researchers Marybeth J. Mattingly and Kristin E. Smith of the University of New Hampshire found that wives were more likely to enter the job market or increase their hours when their husbands were out of work between May 2007 and May 2008 than when their husbands were out of work amid prosperity four years earlier. These women were also three times more likely to enter the labor force than women whose husbands were working and 51 percent more likely to increase their hours. Smith says difficult times may push women to take jobs they wouldn’t consider when the economy is strong. "They have to work," she says. "As families lose their primary breadwinner, they’re making ends meet with a lower-earning spouse."
By now, the impact of the recession on the American male is well chronicled: Men accounted for more than 71 percent of the job losses as sectors like manufacturing and construction were crushed. Even when job losses spread to traditionally female-friendly areas like retail and education, women continued to fare better. The
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Tags: baby boomers, Ben Bernanke, construction, debt, deflation, demographics, Economy, Housing Market, inflation, peak credit, social trends, the Fed, unemployment
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by ilene - June 17th, 2010 12:38 pm
Courtesy of Zero Hedge, Tyler Durden
Some terrific insight from Rosie on the future:
THE OUTLOOK IS ONE OF…
- Deflation: own income-generating securities, which include dividend yield and dividend growth.
- Corporate balance sheet strength and liquidity: own corporate bonds with liquidity, marginal refinancing needs and stable cash flows.
- Intense volatility: invest in classic hedge funds — true long-short strategies that preserve capital and minimize fluctuations in the portfolio.
- Ongoing sovereign credit concerns and recurring rounds of currency depreciation: ensure the portfolio has a core holding in precious metals (gold and silver). These are effective hedges against lingering concerns over the stability of the global monetary system.
I realize that I am viewed as a perma-bear, but it’s my forecast that is bearish, not my personality. I’m bullish on my kids. I’m bullish on my friends — the few I have. I’m bullish on the New York Yankees — please don’t hold it against me. And I’m bullish on my firm. Look — if I really believed that cash was where investors should be, I’d be working at a bank, not a wealth management firm.
… On the present:
Double-dip risks in the U.S. have risen substantially in the past two months. While the “back end” of the economy is still performing well, as we saw in the May industrial production report, this lags the cycle. The “front end” leads the cycle and by that we mean the key guts of final sales — the consumer and housing.
We have already endured two soft retail sales reports in a row and now the weekly chain-store data for June are pointing to subpar activity. The housing sector is going back into the tank — there is no question about it. Bank credit is back in freefall. The recovery in consumer sentiment leaves it at levels that in the past were consistent with outright recessions. By our estimates, the diffusion index on the Conference Board’s leading economic indicator (LEI) in May came in at a disconcerting 40% for the second month in a row. Jobless claims are one of the 10 components of the LEI and last year’s improvement not only stalled out completely, but at around 460k is consistent with stagnant to negative jobs growth. And exports, which had been a
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Tags: baby boomers, bonds, David Rosenberg, deflation, demographics, Equities, fixed-income, global economy, interest, Investing
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by ilene - April 13th, 2010 11:49 am
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds
Bubble valuations and Baby Boom demographics both suggest housing prices have a long way to fall.
Combine home prices that are still at bubble heights with the demographics of aging baby Boomers dumping McMansions and you get massively rising supply overwhelming declining demand.
A recent story in the S.F. Chronicle Real Estate section neatly illustrates the trajectory of tens of millions of Baby Boomer home buyers and owners: Home Appreciation: Concord home steady, secure during ‘roller coaster’
The couple bought their first home in a modest suburb in the late 1970s for an undisclosed price, then bought a home in another suburb in 1980 for $96,000. In 1987 they sold that residence for $110,000 and bought another one for $135,000. They then sold that house for $400,000 in 2002 and bought their current home for a price "in the $600,000s" (realtor-speak for about $650,000). After peaking in value at the bubble top in 2005-06 at around $1,000,000, the home is now on the market for $637,000 ($600,000 + 6% commission).
To peek under the hood of the larger trends, I’ve laid out each buy/sell along with its inflation adjusted value in current dollars. As always, I use the BLS inflation calculator; though it reflects the flaws of the CPI calculation methodology, it is consistent.
1980 purchase: $96,000
in 2010 dollars: $252,000
1987 sale: $110,000
in 2010 dollars: $210,000
1987 purchase: $135,000
in 2010 dollars: $257,000
2002 sale: $400,000
in 2010 dollars: $482,000
2002 purchase: $650,000
in 2010 dollars: $783,000
2010 sale: (projected) $637,000
These inflation-adjusted "real" numbers are insightfully different from the nominal prices.
To place the 1980 valuations in proper context, we need to recall that the U.S. was suffering from sky-high inflation in the late 70s and extremely high rates of new household formation as the 78 millon Baby Boomers went out and bought houses. Those two factors created a housing boom, both in valuations and homes built.
It took $1.36 in 1980 to buy what $1 had bought a mere three years before in 1977. As people fled the stock market for tangible assets and Boomers started families, real estate soared (as did gold). While I don’t have the numbers for that house bought for $96,000 in 1980, anecdotally I can assure you that homes…
Tags: baby boomers, bubble valuations, demographics, Housing, Robert Shiller, valuations
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by ilene - August 6th, 2009 11:56 am
Courtesy of Mish
“Consumers have started to change their behavior and they are going to save more,” said Richard Berner, co-head of global economics at Morgan Stanley in New York and a former researcher at the Fed. “You have pressure on wages, you have employment still declining.”
Wages and salaries, which drive recoveries in spending, fell 4.7 percent in the 12 months through June, the biggest drop since records began in 1960, according to Commerce Department figures released yesterday. The Obama administration’s tax cuts, extended jobless benefits and a one-time Social Security bonus have helped mask the damage done by the worst employment slump since the Great Depression.
Personal incomes, which include interest income, dividends, rents and other payments as well as wages, tumbled 1.3 percent in June, more than forecast and the biggest drop in four years, yesterday’s Commerce report showed. Excluding the effects of the stimulus plan, June incomes would have dropped 0.1 percent after no change in May, according to the report. In May, one-time additional payments to Social Security recipients boosted incomes 1.3 percent.
One of every 10 American workers will be without a job by early 2010, economists project, shaking the confidence of those still on payrolls and discouraging spending. It may take as long as 15 years for consumers to fully repair finances battered by the decline in home values, stocks and employment, said Edmund Phelps, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2006.
Decreasing pay is not the only hurdle for consumers. Plunging home prices and stocks reduced household net worth by a record $13.9 trillion from the third quarter of 2007 through this year’s first quarter, according to figures from the Fed.
“Households are going to have to do an awful lot of rebuilding of their wealth,” Phelps, a professor at Columbia University in New York, said this week in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “Even if that rebuilding goes on at a pretty good clip, it will take 12 or 15 years for households to get to the wealth level that they had several years ago. Consumer demand is going to take a long time to rebuild to normal levels.”
As for unemployment, I think we see 10% by September or
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Tags: baby boomers, salaries decline, unemployment, wages decline, wealth
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.