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Yashi

Monday, April 14, 2014

The great retirement shift

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Last year, Lydia DePillis gathered a group of charts from the Economic Policy Institute on the rise of the 401(k) and the fall of the pension. In 1980, 38% of workers had pension plans. In 2008, just 20% did. Retirement saving is now predominantly individual, and reflects wider inequality trends. Since 1990, the retirement savings of the top-fifth income earners have increased more than 3.5 times, "while they've declined or risen only slightly for most everyone else", DePillis writes.

If you can't rely on a pension, and have to take matters into your own hands, then you have to pay a lot of attention to fees. Matthew O'Brien shows how a 1.25% difference in fees between an actively managed fund and an index fund can make a six-figure difference in retirement funds.

Ron Lieber has an excellent overview of services for people who can't necessarily afford a financial advisor. The idea is that if enough companies try to disrupt the market by setting fees below 0.5% of assets, the price for financial advice may come down across the board. Already Vanguard is disrupting itself: it's replacing one product, with fees of 0.7%, with a replacement that charges just 0.3%.

Not everybody takes advice from the New York Times, however, and the Center for American Progress recommends that retirement plan fees should be transparent, to the point of creating a labeling system like the FDA does for food.

None of this will solve all the problems with individual retirement saving. There's a whole host of behaviors that mean investors invariably see well below market returns. More profoundly still, as Steve Rattner says, young people, as a generation, simply aren't saving enough on their own. The country as a whole needs to deal with the problem, he says, through "a radical restructuring of our retirement plans, including mandated savings". He proposes something like Australia's mandated savings program that automatically diverts 9% of workers' pay to the country's superannuation fund.

In a lengthy thought experiment on the pros and cons of forced savings, Megan McArdle concludes that while there are really good arguments about forced savings on both sides, there is a larger problem: as people spend more time in school and live longer after the retirement age, it may simply not be possible to save enough during a person's expected working years. — Shane Ferro and Ben Walsh

On to today's links:

Charts
"High poverty rates for children in single mother families is a policy choice" - Matt Bruenig
The housing bust killed consumer spending - Atif Mian and Amir Sufi

Bubbly
"Eat when the food is passed": why startups are taking millions they don't need - DealBook

Small Victories
Citi earnings get better because fewer bad things happen - Reuters
Citi finds another, much smaller bit of fraud in its Mexican subsidiary - FT

Good Luck With That
Yahoo, with "zero cachet and no discernible way forward", wants to make great TV - David Carr

Headline of the Day
Stock-Market Jitters Put Investors at Ease - Josh Brown

Oxpeckers
If politics makes us stupid, "then what's the point of Vox?" - Will Wilkinson

Wonks
HFT: a symbol that America is investing in the wrong infrastructure - Paul Krugman

Legal Arcana
The First Amendment lets companies keep quiet about blood diamonds - Matt Levine

Must Reads
Eli Saslow's Pulitzer-prize winning reporting on food stamps - WaPo
Jason Szap and Andrew Marshall's Pulitzer-prize winning report on Myanmar's Rohingya refugees - Reuters

 

 

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Business Today: Wall Street ends up after Citi results, retail sales

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04/14/2014
Reuters Election 2012 Daily round-up of the day's top news from the campaign trail, the White House and all the politics in between
Wall Street ends up after Citi results, retail sales
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks closed higher on Monday as Citigroup's earnings and strong retail sales gave investors reasons to buy equities despite a resurgence of geopolitical uncertainties.
Bullish U.S. retail sales brighten growth outlook
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. retail sales recorded their largest gain in 1-1/2 years in March in a decisive sign the economy is bouncing back from its weather-induced slumber.
Citi posts higher income as troubled assets perform better
(Reuters) - Citigroup Inc posted better-than-expected quarterly income as losses on troubled assets narrowed, but revenue declined in many of its major businesses and operating expenses remained stubbornly high.
Google to buy drone-maker Titan Aerospace
(Reuters) - Google Inc has acquired solar-powered drone maker Titan Aerospace as the Web search giant ramps up plans to deliver wireless Internet access to remote parts of the world.
Lawsuit claims CME gave high-frequency traders special access
(Reuters) - A group of traders has sued CME Group Inc, accusing the operator of the world's largest derivatives exchange of selling market data to high frequency traders, cheating other investors who lacked such access.
Consumers' view of U.S. job market brightened in March: NY Fed
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. consumers grew more confident in the labor market last month, with younger workers in particular seeing a greater chance of finding work should they lose their current job, a survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said on Monday.
Mexico bank regulator, Citigroup report second fraud at Banamex
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Citigroup and Mexico's bank regulator on Monday said they uncovered a second fraud at Citi's local unit Banamex, as part of a wider investigation following the discovery in February of fraudulent loans to oil services company Oceanografia.
Walgreen under shareholder pressure to relocate to Europe: FT
(Reuters) - U.S. drugstore chain operator Walgreen Co is under pressure from a group of shareholders to consider relocating to Europe to gain tax benefits, the Financial Times reported.
GM says heads of communications and human resources leaving company
DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Co announced on Monday that its heads of human resources and communications are leaving the company "to pursue other interests."
Gucci takes direct control of Moscow shops
MILAN (Reuters) - Italian fashion and leather brand Gucci, which is owned by French group Kering , has taken direct control of its shops in Moscow and will open two new sales outlets in the Russian capital, the company said on Monday.
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