Boomernomics: The Future of Your Money in the Upcoming Generational Warfare (Library of Contemporary Thought) - Hardcover

Sterling, William; Waite, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345425839 ISBN 13: 9780345425836

Verlag: Ballantine Books, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Two global financial strategists offer an incisive analysis of the escalating competition among the world's growing economies and explain how Americans can survive and thrive in spite of it, in the latest addition to the current affairs series. Original.

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William Sterling is well known on Wall Street as an investment strategist with a unique global perspective. He is currently head of global equities for Credit Suisse Asset Management. His staff manages more than $30 billion in equity investments, and he directly oversees more than $5 billion in global and international funds, working for New York-based BEA Associates, an affiliate of Credit Suisse Asset Management. After obtaining a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, Sterling worked as an economist for Merrill Lynch in Tokyo in the late 1980s during Japan's financial market boom. From 1989 to 1995 he headed Merrill's international economics group and conducted research on trends in international interest rates, exchange rates, and money flows to emerging markets.<br><br>Stephen Waite has spent the past twelve yea

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n, high employment, a stock market that has reached unprecedented heights. The economy doesn't get any better than this. Clearly, for the seventy-six million baby boomers hitting their prime earning years, the "good old days" are right now, and there's no end in sight. Or is there?<br><br>In this powerful, prescient book, economists and financial wizards William Sterling and Stephen Waite take an indepth look at how America's baby boomers have transformed the nation's--and the world's--economy and how that transformation must inevitably--and radically--alter its course as the boomers age. Grounded in common sense, infused with the startling clarity, Boomernomics is a book you can't afford to ignore.<br><br>Yes, the good times are bound to go on rolling for at least another decade. The demographics fueling the current boom, coupled with the huge benefits of technology and globalization, will take us into the twenty-first century on a building wave of prosperity--and Sterling and W

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Given the record of many modern economic and financial forecasters,
readers may question whether there has been much progress made in the
field of forecasting. Ask your stockbroker sometime why his or her firm's
economic and financial forecasts for inflation or interest rates have
decimal points. If he or she is honest, the reply is likely to be: "To
show we have a sense of humor." That said, as a species we humans have
distinguished ourselves by our ability to look ahead and plan accordingly.

Demographics--the study of human populations--is invaluable to investors.
One of America's most well known bond investors, Bill Gross, put it this
way: If he had to go off to a South Seas island without any source of
communication for the next few years, the one thing he'd want to know when
it came to structuring his investment portfolio would be demographics.

Baby boomers like to think of themselves as highly individualistic and
unpredictable. In reality, as a group, much of their economic behavior has
been highly predictable. Depending on what stage of life the boomers are
in, they have had massive effects on numerous industries and the overall
financial markets. This should continue as the boomers pass through their
middle years and into old age.

The Pig and the Python

Demographers have used the image of a pig slowly passing through the body
of a python to describe the massive displacement created by the baby
boomers as they have passed through different stages of life. The image
captures an important fact: The boomer generation is huge compared to both
the preceding generation and the following generation. That has had
enormous implications for every market that the boomers have touched.
Whenever the boomers reach a new stage of life, demand for related
products soars. The result is a long boom. When the boomers move on and no
longer buy a product, demand slumps. The result is a bust. For any
products or services that are related to the stage of life the boomers are
passing through, paying close attention to the movement of the pig in the
python is critical.

The first boom, not surprisingly, was in baby products. After the GIs came
home from World War II, they and their sweethearts immediately and
enthusiastically started making babies in record numbers. One of the first
firms to feel the impact of the boom was Gerber, which saw its sales
double between 1948 and 1950. Strong sales of baby food continued until
well into the 1960s. Then came the birth control pill in the mid-1960s.
The birth rate slipped, and baby food sales quickly plummeted. Gerber was
then forced to diversify into other businesses such as life insurance and
child care.

That simple pattern of boom and bust has been repeated in one industry
after another throughout the postwar period. For example, America's school
system was swamped in the 1950s as boomers stormed the kindergartens and
elementary schools in large numbers. A boom in elementary school
construction quickly ensued. Not coincidentally, the boom was associated
with a shortage of well-qualified schoolteachers. In 1957, the nation
worked itself into a panic about the quality of education after the
Russians launched the Sputnik satellite. That hysteria highlighted how the
needs of the boomers were beginning to become central to the nation's
agenda.

Should it have been surprising that the sexual revolution occurred in the
1960s, when tens of millions of teenage boomers were surging with
hormones? Was it a coincidence that the nation focused on "family values"
or "parenting" in the 1980s, when massive numbers of thirtysomething
boomers were raising their own children (the so-called echo boomers)?
Should it have been surprising that a huge boom in real estate occurred in
the 1970s and 1980s? That's when tens of millions of boomers competed
against one another to acquire homes, pushing prices into the
stratosphere.

Likewise, the double-digit interest rates of the 1970s were at least
partly related to the huge surge in demand for mortgages and consumer
loans coming from the young boomers. Like most twenty-year-olds, the
boomers were basically broke in the 1970s. Naturally, they needed to
borrow money in large amounts to buy their first cars, their first homes,
and the furniture to fill those homes. Competing against each other, they
drove the price of money sky high as they piled on massive amounts of
debt.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Ballantine Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0345425839
• ISBN 13: 9780345425836
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 218
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: SC; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/; ; CL MODESTO LAFUENTE 41; Madrid; Madrid; Spanien