I talked last week about the rough-and-ready ‘how much should you save in your pension’ calculation we used in rougher and readier days. If you start at 20-something, to be able to retire at 60 something with half of your income, you need to put away 10% of what you earn every year. That’s every year until you retire. If you start at 30, it’s 15%, at 40, 20% and if you’ve done nothing by the time you’re 50, forget it. In those days, interest and annuity rates were 10% or more, and annuities were the only option. Now there are more choices, but the fact remains that most won’t get near to that 10%, most will expect or need more than half of their income to see them through, and many or most will stop-start throughout their careers. So, yes, the lack of pension savings (and decent pension schemes, now that final salary has disappeared) is a time-bomb ticking pretty loudly, I’d say.
“Tariffs through time: have they ever worked?”
History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes. Is what Trump is doing as ‘unprecedented’ as every headline proclaims? I’m sure other wiser writers have spotted some of these historical echoes, but let’s remember some headlines from US history.
