Quote

Anyone with a pension or retirement is an investor in the stock market.

The retirement age needs to be raised. A portion of Social Security ought to be privatized, if not all. And there probably needs to be some means testing. It's a Ponzi scheme that's not sustainable.

I was a stock broker once. I think there is an absolute place for market investments. But they should never be the basis of one's retirement. They should be an additional piece on top of a basic, secure, guaranteed retirement benefit.

Even I have been at that point in my life where I thought I didn't have enough extra money laying around to start investing in stocks for my own retirement plans.

I agree that we must expand opportunities for retirement saving, but we must not undermine this worthy effort with a flawed privatization scheme that takes the 'security' out of Social Security.

When people retire, their income drops much more sharply than their consumption. As a result, they stop saving and start drawing down the assets they've acquired during their high-saving years. That could start to put upward pressure on interest rates and downward pressure on stock prices.

I have to think about the possible ramifications of an early retirement.

You can't have personal investors anymore because it's too expensive, so you have to have corporate investment or a lot of rich people.

Do I want to see people take their Social Security payments and put them into private accounts, open up an eTrade account and go into the stock market? Absolutely not.