MADRID | By JP Marin Arrese | The Spanish government is about to reform the pension system so as to improve the budgetary balance. However, the current policies will not yield results in the short or medium-term and they won’t prevent deficits from emerging.
Wages decline has put Spain back in the beginning of the century. But the warning sign for the country are citizens’ pensions: crucial for the most defenseless. Both President Mariano Rajoy and the Spanish society have an enormous stake in social welfare.
What is threatening the Spanish pension system, Francisco Martín Seco says, is not a longer life expectancy or the population pyramid but policies that drive the entire economy into a permanent recession, like reforms to make the tax system more regressive.
NEW YORK | Times are tough for pensions. Retirement plans are not golden anymore. After the crisis, U.S. companies started to get rid of many pension funds or are allocating less money for them. And while the market has substantially recovered from the 2009 low, pension funds portfolios as well as supplemental savings and retirement accounts for individuals remain significantly smaller than they were at their peak. Last year, Standard…
LONDON | The future is an economic frightening sight for the younger generations in the UK. Up to 79% of Britons anticipate their income as pensioners will be too low or inflation will erode their savings. Only 26% of people believe they will be better off than their parents when they retire. A survey released Wednesday by Vision Critical shows that more than 17.2 million of British people think their personal finances…