Raoul Pal on the baby boomer savings complex
2024-04-20 18:09:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Raoul Pal in a recent episode of his podcast [22:13]:
You see everything did break back in 2008. Peak population growth created these problems going forwards and we are seeing the central banks doing one thing and one thing only. In fact, I think the governments are doing one thing and one thing only. […] Their entire job is to keep afloat the great baby boomer investment complex.
You see most of the savings in the US and across the world are in older populations. Those were the richest populations the world had ever seen. Those have all of the wealth. In the US particularly they own equities, in Europe they own bonds. In Japan they own bonds. So what you can’t allow is the equity market to collapse. […] Of course the governments and the central banks understood this. They understood all of this. They have been trying to debase currency to optically keep the price of those assets high so the baby boomer savings complex continues.
Two things jumped out at me from his thesis. Firstly, that much of our current economies dynamics are a direct result of demographics. The second thing is that, unlike many from crypto and Bitcoin circles, he believes the central banks aren't incompetent, they know exactly what they are doing.
It's worth listening to the rest of the episode, he makes a lot of interesting observations.