Younger generations have gained more wealth than other age groups since 2019 | Hacker News Reader

Younger generations have gained more wealth than other age groups since 2019

cnbc.com

14 pointsdonsupreme18 comments

"Granted, those under 40 are still the poorest of the generations."

Well at least the article is honest about it. But maybe this indicates the beginning of things getting better :)

better in the "not at minimum wage anymore" sense, but not good

How much of this is because older generations had a lot of Covid deaths? Presumably those assets were passed down.

Not much. The article says 1Q 2019 to 3Q 2022 is the cited timespan. Covid accounted for less than 10% of overall deaths in that period, and many would have passed away anyway in that time (the average remaining life expectancy of a Covid death was something like 9 to 18 months by different surveys I saw.)

Covid was probably a factor in the numbers, though; young people were both locked inside and couldn't go out to spend money, and also were handed free money by the government.

Although that's probably a small effect too. I'd guess the largest real reasons are the increasing minimum wages in many states, and the decline in starting families and raising (expensive) children.

Where are you getting 9 to 18 months? Everything I’ve seen suggests 10 years:

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/people-coronavirus-dying-1...

> Using a statistical measure called "years of life lost," researchers found that COVID-19 strips more than a decade away from a person's life, on average. For men, the viral infection takes away about 13 years of potential life lived. For women, it's more like 11 years. Both numbers account for underlying long-term conditions.

In nominal terms, but in real purchasing power? No. If you take the S&P and divide it by the Fed balance sheet it's gone sideways. The only securities that have grown relative to the Fed balance sheet, so in real purchasing power terms, is the NASDAQ 100 and BTC.

So what's happening here? Well currency is being debased through Fed asset purchases. The Fed is manipulating the price of assets and flooding financial markets with liquidity, while simultaneously making it look like inflation (how it is traditionally measured) is low. Inflation measures don't take into account stock market prices.

However you can't blame them for doing this now. The system could have been de-leveraged in the 90s but post 2008 if the Fed doesn't do this the entire global financial system would collapse if the securitized collateral of the system was allowed to correct due to hypothecation. No one wants the US to end up like Argentina. So now the West is ending up more like Japan where the BoJ is the purchaser of last resort.

All my analysis points to the only chance non Boomers have is push out far into the risk curve by buying BTC, and/or the NASDAQ 100 (or the "Magnificent 7 Stocks" consisting of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla if you want to concentrate your holdings and avoid annual ETF fees).

You can forget most of what's taught in a CFA or in a Finance degree. The collateral of the system cannot be allowed to crash and so market interventions will continue until a new financial system is imposed (probably CBDCs).

Only network adoption rates seen in BTC (and more risky crypto) or growth fueled by tech/software companies (and AI by extension) eating the world can outpace Central Banks.

As usual, GenX gets left out. Boomers got rich. Now Millenials.

Good thing we don’t care… #slackergeneration

No one forgot about Gen X, Gen X forgot to have a generational identity.

As a member of the hated “Millenial” generation, that honestly sounds nice

Per the article, GenX is worth twice what Millenials are. Can you provide any evidence for your assertion?

Again we are much older so wealth over time but we had peak earnings during lost decade.

And really it’s probably late Xer who tried to buy a home after they tripled in early 2000s just as we graduated.

Gen X had twice as much as Millenials at the same age: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/03/precariou...

This isn't about just being older, Gen X has consistently been given a larger share of the pie than millennials.

You're only winning as a GenXer if you bought your house at all time low interest rates. If you're still renting you'll find it exponentially harder to save purchasing power in real terms to buy a home and you're still faced with affordability slipping away due to higher interest rates. Add in job losses due to AI and it's bleak.

Millennials are 30's-40's now, they got skipped too.

Surprise! Thing with small denominator has large percentage growth vs thing with large denominator /s

> Granted, those under 40 are still the poorest of the generations.

Yep, this title seems to be cherry-picked to sound positive despite not actually changing much.

> > Granted, those under 40 are still the poorest of the generations.

I'm shocked, SHOCKED that generations that had more time to accumulate wealth has more wealth accumulated!

I'm kind of surprised that on average Americans continue to accumulate more wealth than debt. I'd prefer to be seeing median numbers to totals per generation.

This entire subthread is missing the premise of the article. It's looking at the percentage of total wealth held by each age interval, and seeing how that percentage changed, which was in favor of the youngest. It's not just saying that older people have more, that's obvious and expected and still true.

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