The US has pushed the burden of retirement onto individuals, hoping that the private sector will offer incentives like 401k matching and generous health care plan subsidies, but this is a fundamental difference in who qualifies, what they receive, and how it's funded. These effects compound wealth and income inequality. If, for whatever reason, you're locked out from a job that would help pay for these programs, there's no coming back. You are dependent on the government at the same time as the government is underfunding the program you rely on. It's not a great situation.
Defined contribution plans don't have the same flaw. What you get out of it depends on how much money you put in and how much alpha your investments get. If you don't have enough to support a comfortable lifestyle in retirement, it's not the government's fault, it's user error: You didn't put enough money in, or you didn't invest it properly. The politicians set up systems to help you; "If you didn't use them properly, too bad, so sad, but it's not our fault," they say.
Which brings the question ... WHY did they do this?
Politicians: to spend the money (and not on retirees, on their own projects), in other words: when it comes to money, ideally you do not own, but do decide what money is spent on.
Banks (and the rich in general): to redirect a percentage of the money to themselves in 1000 different ways. They can't really get money unless there is large amounts of socially accepted debt in society, it doesn't work: can't get blood from a stone.
Now, when this leads to the problem that either the money disappears, or the social contract behind the debt disappears (ie. either pensions drop to almost nothing, and the spending/social contract (ie. if pensions aren't paid out/aren't livable the willingness of people to pay for pensions disappears, and the debt ... oh dear god the horror ... disappears, and with it the lifeblood of banks and the rich). Then of course panic sets in, and suddenly when THEY get in trouble any law change imaginable is suddenly on the table.
The scary part is the obvious solution, the only solution really. You know what would solve the pension crisis without destroying the social contract? If the elderly were to die (a lot) faster. That is the only way the politicians can keep spending and banks can keep their profits. Which is exactly what Trump's doing with the enormous increase in medical costs. For the elderly it's simple: pay ... or die. That's the new social contract here. In other words: in what I'm sure will come as a total surprise to everyone, when democrats get control again, they will see how much it costs, how much of their projects it would kill ... and then will not refund Obamacare to anywhere near the level before Trump and they will in fact vote to keep this new social contract in place.
Of course reality is simple: politicians and the rich are promising pensions to everyone, and the really obvious truth is starting to become glaringly fucking obvious: they're lying. One way or another, you're not getting the pension you paid for, you're not getting the medical care you're paying for. You paid the money, and ... you're NOT getting the service you paid for! You also, of course, don't get to stop paying, in fact they're demanding more now. You don't get to stop working. Obviously, politicians don't want to be called to account for that one.
Kill the elderly: it's either that ... or take the money from the rich. Easy choice, no?
But if you already have enough to never need to work again, you should be fine in almost any liberal and politically stable country, and there's something to be said about moving to a lower CoL place where you can afford a nicer home, etc.
Top attractors are London (non-dom era), Singapore, Dubai, Miami, Austin, SF, NYC, Hong Kong (pre-[1])
Top repellers/outmigration are London (post-abolition of non-dom), Moscow, Hong Kong (post-[1]), China, high-tax zones in Europe, India, developing nations
For places that are in both lists but at different times, you can see the massive impact of public policy (non-dom tax haven, Chinese hand)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hong_Kong_national_securi...
https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-02/wealth-mortality-gap
In some specific cases, the mortality rates of the wealthiest Americans were roughly equivalent to the poorest individuals in countries like Germany/France/the Netherlands.
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2025-04-03/richest-a...
At some point the greedy rich people will realize that their well-being immediately depends on the well-being of others around them, and that at some point if you want to increase YOUR longevity (/quality-of-life, /pleasure, etc) you need to increase EVERYONE's longevity (/quality-of-life, /please, etc)
What on earth are they doing over there that's so crazily unhealthy you can have no fun and still only live as long as a beer swilling chain smoking European working class person?
Lax immigration policies were thought a solution to that, though I think almost anyone would agree (non the least the immigrants themselves) that the implementation of this solution was bungled fairly spectacularly.
Regardless of the merits of immigration as a solution, the nordics are very much, along many other western countries, kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place with regards to the demographic distribution.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Sweden_p... (it's actually looking a bit better now. For a while it had a very sort of unfortunate buttplug shape)
https://web.archive.org/web/20260207195051/https://theloop.e...
Pension and healthcare are the two most obvious pieces governments can decide to "make it themselves" or "let companies solve it", and the later option creates the pieces of paper that get traded in financial markets and "frees" money to buy those papers.
And the article ends with the obvious notice that "large markets" is not something good by itself.
It was a tough read. He should tighten his word choice.
If you read some of the literature out on China and their anomalous savings rate (household consumption is only 40% of national income) studies show that the lack of a social safety net exacerbates the problem and savings rates decline once you have the safety net.
One difference they noticed was the dramatic decline in savings rates as you go from rural to urban areas. In urban areas you have a different social safety net -- a government pension, but in rural areas the pension is optional and savings rates are dramatically higher. Because much social spending in China is handled at the provincial or city level and there are differences, it is a natural laboratory for these types of studies. It's also why you need a citizenship document when trying to "emigrate" into a city or different province, and there are internal controls that limit what city you can be registered in, which also affects things like car registration, real estate purchases, and access to local education in the city for people that are considered "migrants" - e.g. they physically live in the city but do not have enough points to be registered there.
It’s probably not all so drastic as that, but for me (and many other American millennials) my financial ethos has been squarely centered on saving and making hay while the sun shines. Compound that over 300M people and multiple generations and you do get overly deep and inflated capital markets.
It's an obvious propaganda post intended to demonize the financial markets, and promote unsustainable social security policies.
It's pretty obvious that pension fund managers have ulterior motives. It also seems insane that a bad pension fund or company directors can destroy people's retirement.
