Mad about the price of eggs? How about the dearth of new homes, skyrocketing cost of gold, global warming, the fiscal deficit, prescription drug access, student loan debt, mortgage rates, the decline in (or perhaps the persistence of!) public union rolls, that promotion you didn’t get at work or the soulless corporate hegemony of America’s downtowns?
You could try to parse the interlocking, complicated sociopolitical factors that have convinced many Americans that the economy is in poor straits, and that their lives will be less fruitful than their forefathers’. Or you could blame the baby boomers.
How it’s pronounced
/ˈsil-vər (t)su̇-ˈnä-mē/
It’s increasingly convenient — and not without some merit — to pin much of the credit or blame for the economy on the generation born in the roughly two decades after World War II. This is somewhat a matter of mathematics: An estimated 73 million boomers, ages 60 to 78, live in the United States, making them roughly one-quarter of the population.
Their departures from the work force will amount to a “silver tsunami,” in the words of financial analysts and economic researchers, that will upend life, work and retirement. An uptick in use of the barometrically inflected term nods to what some see as an unstoppable demographic disaster caused by the confluence of a wave of retirees and relative dearth of young people.
By 2035, the Census Bureau estimates, older adults will outnumber people under 18 in the United States for the first time.
As is typical in the world of business, what some see as a crisis others see a chance to pounce. “Silver tsunami” has been used in recent months to encourage investors to put money into the initial public offering for a pharmacy focused on long-term care facilities — an aging populace will need more drugs is the argument — to sell investment management products to teetering public pensions and to explain why chains increasingly see opportunity in buying up businesses from the mammoth tide of independent proprietors who are retiring.
As one bank put it, rather bloodlessly: “The silver tsunami provides acquisition opportunities.”
It should be noted that some find the term offensive. One missive from the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis called the phrase “fatalistic and negative” and suggested that it be eliminated from writing. The advice appears not to have been heeded, as the term has since been used by the United Nations, National Cancer Institute and government agencies as far away as India and Malaysia.
Investors and market strategists even use the term to make opposite predictions: This reporter first noticed the phrase in November when an investor used it in predicting a housing market collapse caused by an imminent wave of retirees downsizing, and then quickly saw it deployed by someone else to justify the opposite forecast: a sustained increase in home prices because older Americans are increasingly choosing to stay in their longtime abodes rather than move to senior living communities.
It is perhaps safest to stick to a more neutral meteorological observation, that demographic trends will have a seismic effect on the economy. Changes are coming, but they may not sweep us all away.
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