LONDON RIOTS

LONDON, UK, OCTOBER 14, 2011: Londoners are different after the passage of four years when I last visited. Then the UK economy was humming, real estate was going through the roof and everyone thought the good times would never end.

The good times have ended. You can see it in Londoners faces and hear about it when you talk with them. Sure everyone is giving the “stiff upper lip” and boasting about the upcoming London Olympics but underneath all this hoopla is an strong undercurrent of apprehension and sobering news.

The recent riots caught practically everyone by surprise and awakened a lot of people as to the nation’s perilous condition. The riots showed that many are in financial trouble. They will happen again.

The unemployment figures just came out and showed that a million plus UK youth were unemployed – a record. Unemployment for all ages is at all time highs. As David Evans reports in the Daily Telegraph, the Bank of England has tried to save the economy by cutting interest rates and printing more money with the effect that british pensioners’ incomes have been reduced by an average of 4,000 pounds a year. The value of their savings has shrunk by 10,000 pounds and their household items’ prices has increased 19%! Does this sound familiar? Aren’t we going through the same scenario in the US?

As I warned in 2006 at an Oxford University Longevity Conference and was quoted in the international press, people will be living younger longer and governments were not planning for this. Flash forward to today where the UK government just announced that it was going to have to increase the retirement age because of increases in human longevity. They finally got it!

On to Madrid for more lessons about the United States’ future if we don’t act now to
address the dual tsunamis of aging populations and misguided macroeconomic policies.