Recently, Larry Fink, the CEO of the world’s biggest money manager Blackrock, issued a public letter about retirement security. While the letter includes a number of thoughtful points about retirement security, at its core, it gets the entire issue backward.
Unsurprisingly for a highly successful Wall Street CEO, Fink thinks that the financialization of America’s private sector defined benefit system since the 1970s and its replacement by underfunded savings accounts is a good thing. And so, he stands amid the destruction that flowed from that policy-driven disaster and wonders why Americans are facing retirement with no ability to support themselves. His solution? Don’t retire! However, the real solution is to adequately fund and structure our retirement security system the way other developed countries do.
