The Round Table Insight: Charles Hugh Smith on The Intensifying Pension Crisis
The comments below are an edited and abridged synopsis of an article by Financial Repression Authority
The FRA interviews Charles Hugh Smith, an author and leading global finance blogger. He has written nine books on the economy, including A Radically Beneficial World; Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All, Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change and The Nearly Free University & The Emerging Economy. His blog, oftwominds.com, has logged over 55 million views and is number 7 on CNBC’s top alternative finance sites.
This article is a discussion about the tension between public pensioners and the population that pays for their pensions—mainly in the form of property taxes and other fees. There is a growing tension all over North America, and its likely to result in a growing pension crisis across the continent and globally, too.
Smith: “The demographic, we didn’t really talk about this much, but as we know, millennials as a generation are already burdened with tremendous student loan debt and compared to previous generations, their earnings in their 20s and 30s is considerably lower than what was achieved by Generation X and the baby boomers. That question comes down to whether the millennials want to marry and have children, unless they’re both brain surgeons or CFOs of a company about to go public or somebody earning extraordinary amounts of money like a quarter million dollars each, that dream is not doable anymore in a lot of places. In other words, they can’t marry and have children, have a decent life and buy a house. Generationally, what we’re going to end up with is that we’re hollowing out these very high cost houses and we’re leaving the baby boomers and people that bought their homes long ago with a lot of equity but we’re putting a lot of incentive for younger families and households to leave because that’s the only way they can afford to buy a house and have a family.”