{"id":25778,"date":"2017-09-17T20:34:11","date_gmt":"2017-09-18T01:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25778"},"modified":"2017-09-17T20:34:11","modified_gmt":"2017-09-18T01:34:11","slug":"pension-storm-warning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25778","title":{"rendered":"Pension Storm Warning"},"content":{"rendered":"<header>\n<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mauldineconomics.com\/frontlinethoughts\/pension-storm-warning#storms\">Pension Storm Warning<span style=\"color: #333333; font-size: 16px;\"><\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"body\">\n<p><em>This time is different<\/em> are the four most dangerous words any economist or money manager can utter. We learn new things and invent new technologies. Players come and go. But in the big picture, this time is usually not fundamentally different, because fallible humans are still in charge. (Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart wrote an important book called <em>This Time Is Different<\/em> on the 260-odd times that governments have defaulted on their debts; and on each occasion, up until the moment of collapse, investors kept telling themselves \u201cThis time is different.\u201d It never was.)<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless, I uttered those four words in last week\u2019s letter. I stand by them, too. In the next 20 years, we\u2019re going to see changes that humanity has never seen before, and in some cases never even imagined, and we\u2019re going to have to change. I truly believe this. We have unleashed economic and technological forces we can observe but not entirely control.<\/p>\n<p>I will defend this bold claim at greater length in my forthcoming book, <em>The Age of Transformation<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Today we will zero in on one of those forces, which last week I called \u201cthe bubble in government promises,\u201d which I think is arguably the biggest bubble in human history. Elected officials at all levels have promised workers they will receive pension benefits without taking the hard steps necessary to deliver on those promises. This situation will end badly and hurt many people. Unfortunately, massive snafus like this rarely hurt the politicians who made those overly optimistic promises, often years ago.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this year I called the pension mess <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mauldineconomics.com\/frontlinethoughts\/angst-in-america-part-5-the-crisis-we-cant-muddle-through\">\u201cThe Crisis We Can\u2019t Muddle Through.\u201d<\/a> Reflecting since then, I think I was too optimistic. Simply waiting for the floodwaters to drop down to muddle-through depth won\u2019t be enough. We face an entire new ocean, deeper and wider than we can ever cross unaided.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pension Storm Warning This time is different are the four most dangerous words any economist or money manager can utter. We learn new things and invent new technologies. Players come and go. But in the big picture, this time is usually not fundamentally different, because fallible humans are still in charge. (Ken Rogoff and Carmen [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9756,10909,4790,15364,1816,4192],"class_list":["post-25778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-carmen-reinhart","tag-john-maudlin","tag-ken-rogoff","tag-maudlin-economics","tag-pensions","tag-this-time-is-different"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25778"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25779,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25778\/revisions\/25779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}