Skip to main content

Economic Circumstances for the Kids of the 60s and 70s

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has published a report today which looks at the economic circumstances of cohorts born between the 1940s and 1970s.  It makes for depressing reading for those, like me, born in the 1970s. Basically, we're going to be worse off as a cohort than previous generations. I dread to think of the prospects for those born in the 1980s! The bottom line seems to be that we need to save more. Here is a snippet from the report's executive summary:
This report compares and contrasts the economic circumstances of individuals born between the 1940s and the 1970s, currently aged between their mid-30s and mid-70s. In doing so, it aims to provide a sense of the likely economic position of the younger cohorts in later life, in absolute terms and relative to their predecessors. The main conclusion is that individuals born in the 1960s and 1970s are likely to be reliant on inherited wealth if they are to be any better off in retirement than their predecessors. When compared with those born a decade earlier at the same age, these cohorts have no higher take-home income; have saved no more previous take-home income; are less likely to own a home; are likely to have lower private pension wealth; and will tend to find that their state pensions replace a smaller proportion of prior earnings. Many more people in younger cohorts expect to inherit wealth; but expected inheritances are distributed unequally and are higher for those who are already wealthier. 

Popular posts from this blog

How Valuable Are Connections?

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak and Todd Mitton have written a paper on whether firms connected to Timothy Geithner benefited from these connections. They do so by looking at how stocks of these firms reacted to the announcement that he was a nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008. They find that there were large abnormal returns for connected firms. Below is the paper's abstract and the full paper is available here . The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner's confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Excess returns for connected firms may reflect the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small ne...

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, co-authored with my colleague Will Quinn , is forthcoming in August. It is published by Cambridge University Press and is available for pre-order at Amazon , Barnes and Noble , Waterstones and Cambridge University Press . 

Bank Runs in Greece

Deposit withdrawals in Greece have been substantial over the past two years.  However, the failure of Greece's politicians to form a coalition government has resulted in deposit withdrawals accelerating - click here and here for more on this.  Depositors are rightly concerned about the exit of Greece from the euro and the subsequent devaluation of their deposits.  The puzzle for me and many others is why are there so many deposits still remaining in the Greek banking system.  One reason is that the Greek banking system is being kept alive by massive injections of money from the ECB.  Will the ECB continue to support the Greek banking system in the face of a mass withdrawal of deposits?  I doubt that there is the political will in Germany for this as the Bundesbank already has a huge exposure to Greece (as well as Spain and Italy) through the ECB's internal Target 2 system.