Don’t Count on Your 401(k)
The next financial crisis—yes, we saw it coming.
By Mark Gimein
If several years before the financial and credit crisis hit someone had told you that the housing market was preposterously overvalued and derivatives were headed for cataclysm, would it have been worth paying attention to? The answer’s pretty clearly yes, ain’t it? Of course, some of the best minds in finance—from Warren Buffett to Yale housing economist Robert Shiller—did. It’s just that hardly anyone listened.
Now there’s another crisis building. It’s just as big. Again, some of the best thinkers in the financial world are warning about it. (Yes, Buffett’s one of them.) And yet again, as is often the case with gathering storms, most of us are doing our best to ignore the warning signs.
Americans lost almost one-quarter of their retirement savings last year. But even if there were no market drop, we’d still be facing a disaster in the making.
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