You think the stock market will be around when you are old enough to need your 401k? I max my contributions but I have no faith they won't be wiped out in some future crash.
The stock market recovered years ago from the Great Depression and is doing really well again.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (a common benchmark index such as the Standard and Poor's 500) is literally at an all time high and is on the cusp of 20,000: https://www.google.com/finance?cid=983582
Edit: Changes "shares in instruments to shares or instruments". It was a bit ambiguous and I was originally trying to make it more obvious that shares are considered instruments (along with several other things traded).
I could have gone into more detail, as you have done here, but that's not the point. The point is that downturns like the Great Recession do not permanently harm someone's retirement.
Shares are instruments [1]. (You say this later, but nobody buys "shares in instruments").
Exchanges, together with ECNs, OTC markets, broker-dealers, other market makers, buyers, sellers, arbitrageurs, investment banks, et cetera make up the stock market.
OP is discussing a 30+ year time horizon, though. I can think of a few potential things that would precipitate not just a crash, but a long-term economic malaise:
- Climate change - Political/social unrest (extrapolate Brexit, Trump, etc) - Mass unemployment caused by automation (you can't "retrain" 5MM 50yo truck drivers) - Empire collapse (has happened with every single empire in history - what makes the U.S. exempt?) - Nuclear exchange (tensions with Russia steadily increasing) - Grey goo / UFAI (I know, crazy, but still, 30+ year time horizon)
While I'm sympathetic to the view that alarmist "the crash is coming" thinking is likely incorrect, whenever one discusses decades-long time horizon in an era of accelerating technology and political uncertainty, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the VIX is not considering tail risk of unlikely, but highly impactful events.
...
> Climate change
The climate change consequences big enough to cause a long-term economic malaise are far enough out to not affect most of today's workers. We'll mostly just get things that cause short term disruption, like more large storms, more weather variability, more record high tides, and similar things.
The big things, like sufficient sea level rise to require abandoning significant parts of many major cities, long term changes in water availability that significantly change agriculture for whole regions, and so on are usually forecast to be in the 100+ year timeframe.
This is one of the frustrating things about climate change. Over the long term it likely has disastrous consequences for humanity, but it can be largely averted or at least limited if action is taken early enough. But "early enough" puts you a time when the consequences are still localized and intermittent, and so it is easy for people to overlook it (especially when they can make more money by doing so).
Source?
The US isn't anything like traditional historical empires for one. It hasn't built its prosperity on invading other nations to annex them and plunder their national wealth, which is traditionally how empires temporarily sustain themselves. The US built its immense wealth today (just under half of all private wealth on earth is owned by Americans) overwhelmingly through invention, engineering, industry, trade, manufacturing, radical productivity gains spanning two centuries, and lots of immigration. Historical empires have always run out of lands to conquer and wealth to steal from other nations, and then they collapse as they fail to placate their own people or get defeated militarily by the lands they previously conquered.
The USD global reserve is a vulnerability? That's one potential issue. However, the US was the world's largest economy - by about 1890 - long before it had the global reserve currency. Japan has a disastrous situation on its hands economically, and a currency they're very aggressively abusing, and yet they're still the world's #3 economy with a substantial GDP per capita. The notion the US would just wilt without the global reserve currency, is absurd.
What lands has the US annexed that it's going to get pushed out of (and lose the plunder/tax from said nations)? What nation/s is the US stealing all of its prosperity from, such that that is going to end soon? Are we taking $5 trillion annually from Vietnam and Mexico (it's actually the other way around given the vast US trade deficit, we're sending hundreds of billions to the rest of the world)?
Further, the US was the first Capitalist nation. From day one it was heavily built on the principles of the free market and trade, not invasion and plunder. (and before anyone chimes in to loudly proclaim that the US has never been a perfect Capitalist nation: no kidding, such wasn't implied) Otherwise there would be no Canada, at some point in the last century we would have invaded for their natural resources. The US also would have pulled a Russia, and taken Japan and parts of Europe, using its rather wild military & resource advantage at the end of WW2.
First, Bretton Woods established a system that heavily favored US interests -- it was based on dollars and gold, and the US had most of the gold supply. The US was able to achieve this favorable position thanks to its place as the major merchant-state, lender, and latecomer ally/victor in WWII. Among other effects, this system led to the dollar becoming accepted as the foundation for most international trade in the latter 20th century.
After the dollar's position became less favorable in the late 1960s, the US ended the Bretton Woods system and worked out agreements with OPEC to shift oil trades into dollars. This had the effect of cementing the USD as the currency of global trade (among other benefits), as all countries needed to hold dollars in order to purchase oil. This "agreement" was backed up by US military and economic hegemony.
Additionally, during this time, the global "south" was being pillaged for resources -- particularly oil, but also cropland (see bananas and sugar) and other scarce resources. The US established and propped up dictatorships that were favorable to its aims under the guise of fighting Communism. The USSR was doing the same thing in reverse, of course -- a grand game of chess, with the spoils to the victor.
Finally, the US "won" against the USSR through a combination of clever psychology, propaganda, and economic warfare, as well as Soviet mismanagement. When the USSR collapsed, the US obtained some economic benefits from the disentangling of the Soviet system, prolonging its advantage.
The US position was unsustainable, though, and this is when the shift occurred. With the relative increase in global stability and international "free" trade, as well as the power of the Internet, corporations no longer needed the protection of the US system quite so badly. Outsourcing and distributed operations became more and more common. The US position is not so rosy as it once was. The petrodollar system seems to be unwinding as well.
I do live in the US, so I do hope that the inevitable correction is a slow one. I also hope that we can avoid starting new conflicts in an attempt to prolong or reestablish our advantage.
1. Bretton Woods worked out to the disadvantage of the U.S. in the long term. Massive budget deficits brought on by Vietnam War borrowing and ballooning social programs, as well as trade deficits, led European countries to withdraw gold from the U.S. in order to preserve the value of their currency reserves. Leaving it was the only option to both stop the drain of gold and also to escape currency pegging so the dollar could be floated to reflect the trade deficits.
2. The reason why OPEC adopted the dollar was for maximum convertibility; at its inception, the dollar was the most circulated currency in the world. It was, at the time, the one backed by the most gold. The Euro did not exist and the Yen was not as strong or stable.
3. Resource pillaging surely occurred, but in that time period, massive improvements in domestic manufacturing, resource extraction, and agriculture accounts for the largest increase in U.S. citizens' wealth. Multinationals accounted for a small proportion of U.S. revenue.
4. The U.S. didn't "win" against the USSR despite what Mr. Reagan may told you on TV. The USSR failed economically due to a drop in oil prices due to its undiversified economy and the political impossibility of stopping social and military expenditures without upsetting Communist Party elites. The U.S. received paltry economic benefits from the Soviet unraveling. If anything, it received increased competition from suddenly available labor pools. Political advantage does not translate to economic advantage.
5. Outsourcing began long before the internet was significant. The cause of outsourcing was the improved political stability of countries with competing pools of labor and the improvement and commoditization of technology.
It's convenient to adopt a zero-sum outlook on global trade, to assume that if a country does well it must be at the expense of others. However, study of history does not support this conclusion.
I don't necessarily see the US's actions in the late 20th century as predatory, per se -- in fact, they were very likely a logical response to the cutthroat political situation of the time. With perspective, we now understand more intuitively that the global economy is not a zero-sum game. It's not clear to me that this was the perception in the postwar period, especially since the USSR was seen by many as an existential threat to freedom.
1. I disagree that the agreement was a negative for the US in the long term. Bretton Woods actually led to a trade surplus in the short term, putting the US on a solid footing for international investment and foreign military deployments. During this time US trade relationships and influence were firmly established. In the longer term the financial situation changed, which is why the US decided to leave the agreement.
2. Partially true; this situation was due to the success of Bretton Woods in establishing the dollar as a worldwide reserve currency. However, the other side of this is that OPEC nations had a huge surplus and needed a way to invest their earnings. The US established a relationship with them encouraging huge purchases of US treasuries (often without public awareness) in exchange for military aid. See this article for more info: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untol...
3. I was just stating that this was an added factor. It certainly didn't drive the entire economy.
4. This ignores the effect of US operations (such as the "Star Wars" defense) that were almost entirely for show, as well as an increasingly erratic and aggressive US military posture. The effect of this was to drive the Soviets to "spend themselves to death," which they certainly did. Again, I also agree that Soviet mismanagement was certainly a factor.
5. It began before the Internet, but only really took off once technology made international communication easier. Otherwise I agree with you here. (The post-Soviet era certainly looked more secure for investment though.)
That is exactly how it has built its wealth, what?
Even if the US experienced severe economic, military, and social decline, Illinois isn't going to turn back into the Illiwek Confederation. Those people don't exist anymore.
To put it more simply, America isn't a patchwork of nations and nationalities. Empire's are several nations aggregated into one political union.
If America were in decline, we might lose parts of the southwest to Mexico (due mostly to heavy immigration, not because we stole the land from them), maybe Hawaii, and the colonial territories (Guam, Puerto Rico, etc.).
In a total collapse (post apocalyptic), new nationalities would form, but that takes a long time.
It did plunder their underlying wealth in natural resources. That's not to mention what we've done in the Middle East, South America, Africa, Asia, and even Europe if you go back to the world wars.
I get what you're saying about there not being enough of substrate national power to undermine the US on its own territory but I think externally anti-imperialism is gaining currency just about everywhere. And that will come back to bite us one way or another.
Let's say you have been doing around $10,000 the first 10 years of your career and the economy tanks. You now have 30-40 years until retirement, and you start doing $15,000 or so a year. That money that you put in before this huge crash may not grow that much before retirement, but the money you put in after the crash will be bought at low rates and will grow for a long time. You will also have put in a lot more money post crash anyway.
And you can also do other savings vehicles outside of your 401k to save even more money. I just wanted to illustrate that it's not like people put all of their money into their retirement account on one day and if a crash happens the next they are screwed.
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/...
We are already to the point where there's so much private equity that startups don't need IPOs. So it's entirely possible that the next Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft will never be exchanged on open markets.
Note that I am not actually recommending investing in gold just making your abstract fearful thesis into something real. IMO unless you are talking about some civilization hurting disaster (like yellowstone .. not even then perhaps) markets recover from crashes. in a way they are a measure of optimism for future. so I'd factor than into my plans.