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Sure.

Watching the world go to shit, watch everyone be worse off than their parents, watching billionaires play games with peoples lives and seeing everything getting worse while the markets are soaring ... of course that would make you think all the markets and money are not real and the world should burn.

The COVID was a cherry on top, "we are in this all together," says the dude on his yacht, while you lost your job and place to live. Now the inflation will deepen inequality and poverty.

I think the next crisis of this type, at least for US (and UK which is kind of similar), is going to be when all the millennials get no inheritance, because the healthcare costs for their parents will basically eat everything. That might be another nail in the coffin of the world possibly getting better for them.

In the Easter Europe, where I am, meanwhile, people are more nihilistic than ever. They were rescued from the Soviet command economies that worked badly, and there was a huge jump in living standards - in the 90s and early 2000s. But by now, the non-freedom of Real Socialism was replaced by non-freedom of being precariat that will never own even the commieblock apartment that people made fun of in the 90s - while all the wonderful inventions of the West like healthcare on for the rich and student loans get imported here.

No wonder people are genuinely thinking watching the world burn in nuclear fire might be cool. The climate change that was the cost of luxury of previous generations will destroy humanity anyway, why not go out with a bang?

"when all the millennials get no inheritance, because the healthcare costs for their parents will basically eat everything"

I wonder if this one will be even worse in the US. Much of the market going up and up is because index funds have become the default retirement vehicle. So every month billions flow into the market no matter what. What will happen when the largest generation stops contributing and instead starts withdrawing. If you are right and many elderly will deplete their funds entirely, the value of everyone's retirement investments will drop dramatically in the process. How much of retirement nest eggs in places with terminal demographics like China, Germany and Japan are in international stocks as well? IMO demographics are gonna fuck over millennials yet again. I hope I'll be wrong.

Younger generations are offsetting this with their own retirement savings.

I've seen it argued that millennials are under-saving compared to their parents, but I remember seeing some data recently that contradicted this assertion. I would not be surprised if it were less evenly-distributed across the economy than prior generations.

I don't think we are going to see net outflow from the stock market, maybe just a decrease in inflow.

However I do think "worker shortages" will continue to grow as older people retire from undesirable jobs and aren't replaced by younger people, pushing up wages outside of white-collar and tech jobs and thereby leading to more inflation. I think this is a good thing in the long term and a price adjustment that has been a long time coming, but it needs to be managed properly or things could get really ugly.

"Younger generations are offsetting this with their own retirement savings."

The problem is that the generationd after the boomers are smaller, especially in countries like Germany, China and Japan which have been economic power houses.

> Younger generations are offsetting this with their own retirement savings.

Sounds like a Ponzi scheme, just like Social Security and pensions.

Does it? Is a lake with an inflow river and an outflow river a Ponzi lake?

"Social pension system is a Ponzi scheme" is argument I've heard from people with certain political leaning often enough I wondered if Reagan or Thatcher said it or something.

It never made sense to me. As long as the number of people is relatively stable, there's nothing Ponzi on it. Even with the number of people changing, there are other important inputs into the equation - automation, efficiency, etc.

All of these systems rely on working people to pay the tab for retired people because of demographic shifts and inflation causing outputs to exceed inputs. At least Social Security is definitely a Ponzi that per the SSA will only be able to guarantee me 65% of what I am owed when I hit the (continually increasing) payout age.

I align with neither Reagan or Thatcher, but I did pass my math classes.

But it's not inherently a Ponzi scheme, it's just been mismanaged.

Is taxes paying for education Ponzi scheme as well?

If not, why is current workers paying future workers (now kids) education different from current workers paying past workers (now retirees) pensions?

> why is current workers paying future workers (now kids) education different from current workers paying past workers (now retirees) pensions?

Well for one thing, education scales with demographic shifts and pensions don't. If less people are being born, at a roughly similar cost/student (administrative bloat aside), educational costs go down as the population growth shrinks. Pensions on the other don't, they only go down on the other end (people dying) and reductions in the birth rate negatively impact the ability of successive generations to pay for prior generation's pensions. Education costs are also strictly bounded per person, as they aren't for life, only for K-12.

I'm not trying to be coy, but it's pretty shocking to me there's multiple respondents that don't seem to understand that the basic premise of public pensions/social security are literally ponzi schemes that are unsustainable with demographic shifts. They utterly rely on continued economic and population growth in order to have enough inflows to meet their outflow obligations, which I would suggest is nearly identically equivalent to a ponzi scheme, where you are paying old investors with new investors money...

I don't think anything you said explains why it would be a Ponzi scheme.

Ponzi scheme isn't a scheme because you pay old people with new people's money, but because there is promise of exponential growth that is unsustainable and often literally impossible.

For this to be true of pensions, they would have to (inflation adjusted) grow, which they don't. Yes, if there's less productive people and more non-productive people, that changes the balance but it is a balance, not unlimited growth of a Ponzi scheme.

"A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors." [1]

The only thing there that is arguably untrue about social security / public pensions is "investors". Depending on whether or not you consider contributions to social security / public pensions as an investment or not, it falls on one side or the other of the literal line of what a Ponzi scheme is. Even if you don't consider it an investment, in /every other aspect/ it is effectively the same as a Ponzi scheme.

That is not to say that public pensions are a bad thing. I'm merely pointing out that they carry a demographic risk that is unaccounted for, just as a Ponzi scheme carries significant investment risks that are unaccounted for due to faked returns.

There is no requirement that you promise exponential growth that is literally impossible for something to be a Ponzi scheme. The key element is that you use money from new participants to pay out "returns" to older participants, thus fraudulently claiming/faking said returns. That is it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

Ask all the lakes that have shrunk or dried up because their outflows exceed their inflows.

I'm not familiar with China or Japan, but in Germany, most people don't have large amounts of savings they could withdraw from. The middle class might own the house or flat they live in, for the upper middle class that house doesn't need 100k€ to be brought to up date, but most people don't expect large inheritances.

For German employees, the public pension system is their wealth, and that's not based on stocks etc, but on the next generations contribution + some tax subsidies. Millenials and Zoomers will have fun shouldering that.

So I talk about him a lot but one of the things Petar Zeihan points out is that we are rushing head long towards the greatest contraction of capital that will be seen in our lifetimes, our parents lifetimes, and our children's lifetimes. Basically the boomers are retiring cashing out their 401ks causing that money to no longer to be available for investment and contracting the money supply at the same time the younger generation can't offset it, as you noted.

As a result capital is going to contract and if you want a loan get it right now as fast as you can.

I'm definitely a Zeihan acolyte as well. His analysis usually seems very logical and entirely based in indisputable facts. I do sometimes wonder though given the significance of his predictions why I'm not hearing more arguments against his forecast.

> We were told all these bailouts and austerity and artificially low interest rates were the way to solve things and while stock markets bounced back it never felt like a genuine recovery.

Maybe it's because I'm not in the US, but do people actually feel this way?

Sure, the GFC was a big deal at the time, but as a millennial, who grew up upper-middle-class and is now in his mid-thirties, I don't feel it has impacted me much at all.

Absolutely. I felt this way at the time and I never stopped feeling this way. 2008-2020 always felt to me like an economic recovery for some (homeowners, investors, white-collar and tech workers), but stagnation or regression for others.

> I don't feel it has impacted me much at all.

Your post exemplifies exactly the problem I am describing.

Below you, everyone felt it and felt it hard, everywhere.

I've been staring at your comment trying to decide if it's intentional smugness or ignorance. I'm going to assume good faith.

There were multiple countries with little to no impact from the GFC[1]. These countries include billions of people, and significant portions of the worlds GDP. Most western economies had recovered in 3-5 years[2].

Not everyone felt it and felt it hard, nor was this everywhere. I'm not arguing semantics, for billions of people it was effectively a non issue.

1. https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/go... 2. https://bigeconomics.org/the-countries-most-and-least-affect...

Yeah, certainly from a UK perspective that part of the GP didn't ring true. While my parent isn't one of the boomer generation that will be extremely well off and I personally worry for their retirement, across the generation in general I think they might have experienced the peak retirement experience.

I personally don't think retirement as exists today will be a thing by the time I reach the same age. I haven't really looked much into the history so I could be way off base here. My impression is pensions, state provided and private, only really came into being post WW2. While the age distribution was able to support it there was something of a golden age for the older cohort of the boomer generation with final salary pension schemes, retirement at 50, etc. As the population pyramid continues to invert the pyramid scheme begins to collapse.

Whatever the answer to old age ends up being I don't think it will be particularly recognizable relative to schemes today. Certainly there seems to be no answer to what happens when the next generation of retirees has no housing security or wealth, thanks to the growth of real estate speculation worldwide and rentier capitalism draining younger generations of all wealth.

I often joke that my retirement plan is to rob a bank, either you get the money and run away to somewhere with no extradition, or you go to jail and get bed and board.

To tie into the original post, we joke that our retirement plan is a good backpack for the post-apocalypse wasteland (you get to choose your flavor between war, climate, or many others) trekking, so I like your scenario better.