Albert Edwards, the outspoken global strategist at Société Générale, is sounding the alarm over Boomer-driven spending habits in the UK and France, blaming decades of policy choices for deepening intergenerational strife and sabotaging Gen Z’s economic prospects. In a LinkedIn post, he highlighted “shocking charts” from the Financial Times‘ data journalist John Burn-Murdoch, which showed runaway spending from both governments on citizens older than 65.
“Inter-generational tension is not just because boomers have got rich from QE driving asset prices higher, especially housing,” Edwards wrote, nodding to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s firefighting after the 2008 and 2020 financial crises in the form of “QE,” or quantitative easing, and the by-now standard argument that this inflated asset prices and disproportionately benefitted older and already wealthy people around the world. According to Edwards, the charts show policy choices are robbing the young to soothe the old. “In the UK and especially France, pensioners have broken the public finances in two of the countries who can least afford it. Bonkers!”
