Housing Crash Depletion Of Wealth Hits Baby Boomer Retirement Hard

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/8845

By Doug Cunningham

The housing crash in the U.S. is wiping out wealth that baby boomers could have relied on in retirement. A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research says due to the housing bubble collapse the vast majority of people who were ages 45 – 54 in 2004 have accumulated little or no wealth. Report co-author Dan Baker says this extraordinary destruction of wealth has tremendous implications for families as they enter retirement. Because there’s also a very low savings rate, the report says this means many baby boomers will have only Social Security and Medicare to rely upon in retirement. This report was released as former GAO Comptroller David Walker testified before the House Budget Committee about a proposal to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for future retirees.

[liberal N proud]

1. My statements have been all negative for more than a year

[conscious evolution]

2. This does not surprise me

Years ago while in college I had to read an introductory book on chaos theory.One of the areas covered in the book was how two seemingly unrelated areas of study can actually be related.
One of the examples was retirement rates and the Dow Jones averages.Someone had made a graph which showed how many people were retiring every year and what the DJIA values were.The graph showed a curve for each that was nearly identical.
What made me go what the fuck was how the retirement rates can be used to predict what the DJIA would be doing in the future.You see,due to the US Census bureau,we pretty much know how many people will be retiring in any given year.Bylooking at future retirement rates one can pretty much predict coming trends in the stock market.
What really caught my eye was,according to the projected retirement rates,there will be a major downturn in the stock markets from 2010 thru 2020,with the downturn starting around 2006.Rates that make the great depression look like a mild recession.

I wish like hell I could remember what the title of the book was and who its author was because I would be posting the graphics from it every chance I could get.