An interesting development has started to take place in the economy and will ramp up over the next two decades to a peak, which will completely change the structure of society today. Because while there are plenty of complaints ab out how the boomers own everything, the fact is, the secret to eternal life hasn't been found and they are going to start rapidly dying out, passing their wealth onto firstly spouses, and then children and grand children. Most will go to Gen-X and Millennial generations.
The Boomer generation is the wealthiest generation in history driven by economic growth and asset appreciation, which will make this the largest transfer of wealth in human history. The amounts are hard to pin down precisely, but it will be between about 80 trillion and 140 trillion dollars, and it will fundamentally change the flow of money in the economy.
For the better?
Potentially, but not necessarily.
Firstly, one of the things that is going to happen is that women are going to get significantly wealthier on average, at least to begin with. This is because women on average outlive men, so the boomer husband is likely to die earlier than the wife. That also means that at least for a short while (given their age), the widows will control significant amounts of money. This means that they will be large asset holders that could change the flow of personal wealth.
Not only this, roughly half of the children inheriting the money will also be women, which means that while there might have been an earnings gap at some point, the percentage gap could close dramatically. And again, the average woman tends to invest differently to men, opting for lower risk and lower return investments, that tend to outperform the average man over a long period of time, but can't attract the large percentage gains of high risk, high reward investments.
With the majority soon going to X and Millennial generations though, the big question is how they are going to spend the money, given that especially the millennials are struggling to own assets for themselves now and tend to have higher debt. This means that a lot of the money might go to pay down debt, but the fact is that people in debt also tend to be worse with their money. So even if the debt gets paid down, will the rest go into growth investments, or will it be "free money" that will be spent on unnecessaries?
I feel I know the answer.
But what this means is that there is going to be a huge amount of consumer demand on pretty much everything, which will drive up inflation, but will also be another massive wealth transfer. The inherited money that took a lifetime to collect, will probably take a decade or two to be captured by the 0.1% who are still invested in the supply chain. Of course, they will be dying off too, but their wealth is at a different level, as are the mechanisms they have put in place to ensure that it keeps growing, even after their death.
I might be wrong, but instead of this massive inheritance transfer evening the playing field a bit and giving people a chance to own more of their resources, it will end up supercharging the billionaire wealth growth, which already increased by sixteen percent in 2025 alone. And it is going to keep increasing at an increasing rate, because we are a world of consumers who now care more for how we feel right now, than how we are going to survive tomorrow.
While many won't admit it, we don't tend to value what we haven't worked for that much. And that includes the value of what our parents worked for. Granted, not all parents did well financially (mine were a disaster) so not everyone will inherit, but we have to look at the "on average" of it all, and how that is going to affect the average inheritor. People will be inheriting assets, not just money - which will mean family homes with three bedrooms, but they have no kids and they do have debt. Keep it and keep paying the property tax whilst still in debt? Or sell into a market that might have a lot of sellers? There might also be a lot of investment buyers, looking to buy the dip for rentals.
Whatever happens though, it is going to make for a decent amount of economic disruption that is probably going to see wealth consolidation like we have never seen before. Yet, I don't think it is going to make many lives fundamentally better, because rather than using the wealth to make this world a better place, most of the dollars spent will go down the drain, into the bottomless pockets of the wealthy.
There is a lot of potential.
But unfulfilled potential doesn't amount to much.
Taraz
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