Market Currents
Why America's 20-something's aren't destined to be poor, but its 30-somethings might be:...
-
Saturday, March 16, 8:25 AM ETWhy America's 20-something's aren't destined to be poor, but its 30-somethings might be: "Today’s 30-somethings are climbing out of a deep enough hole that they may never become as wealthy as the boomers unless home values rebound dramatically, and even then, many will only be getting back to even," The Atlantic's Jordan Weissmann writes. (also)
Other date
Latest Macro Articles
This news story has 12 comments:
Most of these folks were just going about their lives, doing what every generation in modern history had done: go to school, get a job, start a family, buy a house.
This generation did not drastically change its behavior from previous generations.
What changed was the system.
Banks could now make loans without being responsible for their quality. People have always tried to borrow more than they could realistically afford, but suddenly banks started *letting* them, because they'd just sell the loan to Wall Street.
Wall Street could bundle up a bunch of trash and get a AAA rating slapped on it and then sell it to your 401(k) fund. They could sell the same crappy loans back and forth to each other, reaping higher and higher fees all the while.
Insurers could sell insurance that they could never realistically make good on. They could make Wall Street feel like they were covered even though they weren't. Worse yet, they let people insure things that they didn't own, turning a linear problem in to an exponential one.
But the typical 30-something (a mid to late 20-something before the crash) had no reasonable way to put all those pieces together. They were real people busy doing real jobs, not trading pieces of paper, not analyzing macroeconomic trends, and certainly not planning the demise of the global economy.
They just...got screwed.
Actually, I think this may extend to a second generation as well. Sadly nothing of significance has been done to reign in Wall Street and the TBTF banks. IMHO, Citicorp, Chase, Wells Fargo and the other megabanks should be broken up similiar to the way ATT was in the 1980's, break each one of these up to 5-8 regional banks, all with separate BoD and governance. As it stands now, even the US Attorney General basically stated the other day not only are these banks to big to fail, the executives are too big to prosecute. This has to be corrected.
And no I am not a socialist.
Were they particularly smarter? No.
Did they work a lot harder? No.
They also did whatever every generation did before them, except that they might be particularly lucky, instead of unlucky. (Nothing against them, by the way -- take the lucky breaks when you can get 'em!)
However, another crash is probably coming soon -- the banks aren't done screwing people yet!
You forget what it was like before 2007 when you and your sister Pelosi took control of congress after your infamous "worst economy since great depression" mantra was drummed into everyone by the drive by media...of course what happen after you got control ..as Paul Harvey would say..Is the rest of the story!
Month by month employment #'s
Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Annual
2003 5.8 5.9 5.9 6.0 6.1 6.3 6.2 6.1 6.1 6.0 5.8 5.7
2004 5.7 5.6 5.8 5.6 5.6 5.6 5.5 5.4 5.4 5.5 5.4 5.4
2005 5.3 5.4 5.2 5.2 5.1 5.0 5.0 4.9 5.0 5.0 5.0 4.9
2006 4.7 4.8 4.7 4.7 4.6 4.6 4.7 4.7 4.5 4.4 4.5 4.4