Retirement Income Security Apres le Deluge

Abstract

This paper surveys the economic wreckage created by Wall Street's decision to manufacture and sell trillions of dollars of financial securities, which we now call toxic. And we call them toxic, not because they were risky, but because they were fraudulent. Rather than address the fundamental reasons the financial sector engages in malfeasance, the US government has been busy issuing its own fundamentally fraudulent securities, namely guarantees to support large segments of the financial sector were there to be major runs on the banks and other financial institutions. Fulfilling such guarantees would require printing trillions upon trillions of dollars and causing hyperinflation. The potential for such runs is very large, indeed, thanks to Uncle Sam's perilous fiscal finances. Achieving fiscal balance and financial security will require fundamental reform of America's retirement, tax, Social Security, and financial systems. These reforms, as outlined here, may strike some as radical. But what is truly radical is maintaining the policies now in place. (JEL codes: H2, H5, and G2) Copyright The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.