Anbei ein kleiner Artikel zum Thema "Baby-Boomer"
Sunday September 17, 2:53 pm Eastern Time
Don't Fear Baby Boomer Stock Selling
By Judith Crosson
BEAVER CREEK, Colo. (Reuters) - Fears that aging baby boomers will start selling their
stocks within the next decade to finance their retirement and spark an ``asset market
meltdown'' are overblown, an MIT professor told an investment conference here this
weekend.
People typically accumulate financial assets while in their 30s and 40s as retirement begins to
show up on their radar screens. Some market watchers have said that when boomers start
unloading stocks, it's going to be ``Katy bar the door'' on Wall Street.
But James Poterba, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor, on Saturday told a conference sponsored
by the Burridge Center for Security Analysis and Valuation at the University of Colorado's College of Business that the
assessment may be off base.
``Older households are often net savers,'' Poterba told the university professors and investment professionals at the seminar in
this posh resort town some 100 miles west of Denver.
He said forecasts that boomers will be selling financial assets as they age are akin to predictions that housing prices would fall
after 1990 when baby boomers' demand for single family homes declined. But that has not been the case, he noted.
Currently about 50 percent of U.S. households own stock either directly or through pension funds.
He said the case for arguing that stock prices will maintain their value is even stronger than the one for single-family houses
because of the global nature of equities markets. ``I could live happily unloading my retirement savings to somebody with a
wireless telephone in a hamlet in China,'' he said.
He said investment professionals need to take a ``healthy skepticism'' toward forecasts that baby boomer selling will have a
large impact on stock prices within the next 10 years.
Poterba said his analysis supported an outlook made at the conference Friday night by Roger Ibbotson, of Yale University and
Ibbotson Associates, that the Dow Jones industrial average will reach 110,000 by the year 2025.
Ibbotson based his estimate on stock market gains on average of about 12 percent a year -- far short of the 20 percent plus
returns some investors have gotten used to and think is their due.
Ibbotson is used to surprising investors with his forecasts. In 1974 when the Dow stood at 851, he forecast the index would
reach 10,000 by 1999. The Dow closed on Friday at 10,927.
Ibbotson is not expecting a straight line up and he noted that his forecast model, which uses the past 75 years of data, includes
the Great Depression of the 1930s.
``Nothing steady about it -- that's the key. If it were steady growth it wouldn't grow that fast,'' he said.
For instance, Poterba noted that an investor in 1967 who was 15 years from retirement, saw the real return on his portfolio fall
to zero by retirement time.
The recent change in pensions has evolved from a defined benefit plan where a retiree's pension payment would depend on the
length of service and represent a percentage of one's salary in the last few years on the job, to a defined contribution, such as
401k plans, that allow workers control over their pension plan.
The new system gives investors freedom on how aggressive they want to be, but also puts the burden of how a portfolio should
look on the shoulders of people not schooled in investing.
``People have been given all the tools and all the information to do radically destructive things with their life savings,'' said Jeff
Maggioncalda, president and chief executive officer of FinancialEngines.com, which provides on-line investment advice to
individual investors.
But the picture may not be that disturbing, according to Steven Manaster, dean of the College of Business at the University of
Colorado at Boulder. ``With more freedom of choice folks sometimes might make wrong choices, but on the whole it's
improving our society,'' he said.
Immerhin war die letzte Vorhersage des Profs erstaunlich genau. Schon 1974(!) sagte er bei einem damaligen Stand des Dow von 851 den heutigen Stand fast punktgenau voraus.
Gruß Dampf
