{"id":66714,"date":"2025-09-16T02:38:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T02:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/66714\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T02:38:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T02:38:13","slug":"top-analyst-who-once-feared-the-end-of-capitalism-rips-french-and-british-boomers-for-sabotaging-gen-z-futures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/66714\/","title":{"rendered":"Top analyst who once feared ‘the end of capitalism’ rips French and British boomers for sabotaging Gen Z futures"},"content":{"rendered":"

Albert Edwards, the outspoken global strategist at Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale, is sounding the alarm over\u00a0Boomer-driven spending habits\u00a0in the UK and France, blaming decades of policy choices for deepening intergenerational strife and sabotaging Gen Z\u2019s economic prospects. In a LinkedIn<\/a> post, he highlighted \u201cshocking charts\u201d from the Financial Times\u2018 data journalist John Burn-Murdoch<\/a>, which showed runaway spending from both governments on citizens older than 65.<\/p>\n

\u201cInter-generational tension is not just because boomers have got rich from QE driving asset prices higher, especially housing,\u201d Edwards wrote, nodding to the U.S. Federal Reserve\u2019s firefighting<\/a> after the 2008 and 2020 financial crises in the form of \u201cQE,\u201d or quantitative easing, and the by-now standard argument that this inflated asset prices and disproportionately benefitted<\/a> older and already wealthy people around the world. According to Edwards, the charts show policy choices are robbing the young to soothe the old. \u201cIn the UK and especially France, pensioners have broken the public finances in two of the countries who can least afford it. Bonkers!\u201d<\/p>\n

Edwards\u2019 call to action should be familiar to followers of his work, recommending drastic changes to fix what he perceives as massive failures in how capitalism is working in the 2020s. Edwards, who is British himself, commented that Burn-Murdoch\u2019s research on how incomes and government spending are higher for both countries\u2019 post-65 populations shows how \u201cpoliticians in France and the UK (in particular) are cowed into political submission by already wealthy, Baby Boomers.\u201d Edwards\u2019 recommendation: \u201cWe \u2018need\u2019 a fiscal crisis for politicians to be able to act.\u201d<\/p>\n

The permabear, the ice age, and the plight of Gen Z<\/p>\n

The Financial Times\u2018 Alphaville<\/a> calls Edwards a \u201cprovocative and voluble strategist\u201d and reminds readers of his two famous arguments: a longstanding \u201cice age\u201d theory, that the \u201cJapanification\u201d crisis of the 1990s will make its way to the U.S. and Europe some day, and being a \u201cpermabear\u201d on stocks. He told Alphaville in 2024 that back in 1996, while working at Dresdner Kleinwort, he concluded that \u201cwhat was playing out in Japan would also play out in the west, with a lag \u2026 basically like the secular stagnation thesis.\u201d<\/p>\n

That thesis, of course, was reintroduced into economic debate in 2013 by Larry Summers, who was then at Harvard, had previously served as Treasury Secretary, and had just recently withdrawn his name<\/a> for consideration to chair the Federal Reserve. At a speech before the International Monetary Fund in November 2013, Summers praised the Fed\u2019s crisis prevention efforts, including QE, but raised the possibility that zero nominal interest rates had become normalized and that economic growth and innovation was proving difficult. Economist Alvin Hansen had invented the phrase in 1938<\/a> while attempting to explain sluggish growth following the Great Depression, but Summers revived it for the 21st century. Slower population growth and less technological progress would hold back wage increases, full employment, and general economic expansion, Hansen predicted.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the economic situation in 2025 is far removed from zero interest rates and the economy has been battling with inflation running too hot instead of too low, while nearly full employment has been a feature of the U.S. economy since the dramatic economic recovery from the pandemic. At the same time, young workers around the world are battling a rising sense of \u201cdespair,\u201d according to economists David Blanchflower and Alex Bryson, who talked to Fortune<\/a> about their research suggesting that the midlife crisis is becoming a thing of the past. <\/p>\n

Blanchflower and Bryson note young worker despair is not driven by a decline in wages, as the ratio of the youth wage to older workers has increased and real wages have also been on the rise. Other findings do fit with Burn-Murdoch\u2019s research, as other costs have added to despair such as the relative prices of housing, healthcare, and student debt. Blanchflower told Fortune that the research shows a worsening of reported mental health since the mid-2010s. Once you rule out wages or unemployment as causes for despair, Blanchflower said he thinks young workers are basically saying \u201cthis job sucks.\u201d Maybe, Edwards\u2019 and Burn-Murdoch observe, there\u2019s justified anger about government spending on the older and wealthier.<\/p>\n

The intergenerational tensions in Asia are downright explosive. A \u201cGen Z\u201d protest in Nepal, which broke out after bans for Instagram<\/a>, TikTok and other social media, has escalated to the point<\/a> where Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has resigned. The Financial Times notes<\/a> a \u201cgrowing regional trend\u201d where elder leads in Oli\u2019s generation\u2014he is 73\u2014are clashing with \u201cdisenfranchised, ambitious and often unemployed young people who are fed up with politics as usual and a lack of opportunities.\u201d The Asian median age is 32 and Nepal\u2019s is 25. Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bangladesh<\/a> have seen similar youth-led uprisings in the 2020s.<\/p>\n

Edwards on \u2018the end of capitalism\u2019<\/p>\n

In April 2023, with inflation elevated for several years in a manner that Apollo Global Management\u2019s Torsten Sl\u00f8k recently likened to an \u201cinflation mountain<\/a>,\u201d Edwards had another take: The greed on display from corporations was simply unacceptable. \u201cThe end of Greedflation must surely come<\/a>,\u201d Edwards wrote, commenting on the phenomenon of companies reporting record profit margins while pleading helplessness on inflation. \u201cOtherwise, we may be looking at the end of capitalism,\u201d he warned. \u201cThis is a big issue for policymakers that simply cannot be ignored any longer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Edwards wrote at the time that corporations, particularly in developed economies like the U.S. and UK, had been using rising raw material costs amid the pandemic and the war in Ukraine as an \u201cexcuse\u201d to raise prices. After four decades of working in finance, he added, he had never seen anything resembling the \u201cunprecedented\u201d and \u201castonishing\u201d levels of corporate Greedflation in that economic cycle.<\/p>\n

Just as he called for a fiscal crisis to focus minds on the intergenerational warfare taking place in government spending patterns, in 2023 he called for a controversial solution to fix greedflation, as he had \u201cweakening confidence\u201d in how capitalism was working. \u201cThose of us who lived through the failed prices and incomes policies of the 1970s\u201d would hesitate to embrace price controls, Edwards wrote, but that is exactly the tool to solve this kind of problem.\n<\/p>\n

Fortune Global Forum<\/strong> returns Oct. 26\u201327, 2025 in Riyadh. CEOs and global leaders will gather for a dynamic, invitation-only event shaping the future of business. Apply for an invitation.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Albert Edwards, the outspoken global strategist at Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale, is sounding the alarm over\u00a0Boomer-driven spending habits\u00a0in the UK…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[79,179,18,300,19,29304,17,25125],"class_list":{"0":"post-66714","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-gen-z","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-inequality","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-protest"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}