The website of economist and keynote speaker Linda Nazareth, expert in demographics, global trends and the future of work
Demographics drives a lot of things including Mergers and Acquisitions (M & A) activity. That is a lesson we are now learning from Japan, where there are apparently too few heirs to take over large companies as their boomer-aged Chief Executives head for retirement. This piece from the Financial Times looks at what is going […]
What if you built a wall to keep people out, and it turned out that no one really wanted to get in anyway? Okay, some people might still want to enter the U.S. from Mexico and other countries which have typically supplied low skill labor, but it looks like their numbers are dwindling. In fact, […]
If I had to think of an industry prone to poisonous industrial relations battles I would probably think first or the auto sector, or maybe even something like education or health. The battles in those industries, however, are apparently being matched by orchestras (can I say ‘in the orchestra industry’?) across North America. Like many […]
Here’s a new one to me: the ‘divorce mortgage’. No its not some crazy, invented term to describe a financing vehicle (my mind went back to ‘plain vanilla swaps’ from the days when derivatives were the buzz), but rather exactly what it sounds like: a mortgage that suits people who own a home together but […]
Twenty and thirtysomethings would apparently rather buy experiences than things, and that has some very definite implications for retailers – or as least that is one theory. As this article from Bloomberg Business suggests, the stock market tells the tale of what is happening very clearly, and will continue to do so as the millennials […]
When people rhyme off the things they want to do in retirement, ‘pay off debts’ is never on the list. Nevertheless, it is something that baby boomers will have to do anyway, if data from the New York Federal Reserve (NY Fed) is to be believed. According to a just-released study by the NY Fed, […]
Like it or not, the sharing economy is everywhere. I’ll go as far as saying it will be one of the big economic stories of 2016, although its influence will extend far longer than that. It’s a different way to do business, and it works for a lot of people and a lot of businesses. […]
We all say it, and we worry about it too: we are an aging society, and that’s going to have repercussions. In Canada, the median age of the population is now close to 41 while in the U.S. it is still-youthful 37ish but rising (according to the last census, seven states have a median age […]
I had barely heard about Campus Coliving and their business model before I saw the sad announcement yesterday that they were closing down the company, a result of not being able to make any money at it. The problem I’d say is that as a company they were ahead of their time. We have not […]
“I’m trying for Freedom 95” says a friend explaining his retirement plans. It’s a joke, sort of. Some people try, or used to try, to save enough to get out of the labor force a good ten years ahead of the norm, and maybe they do manage it (London Life has a financial planning division […]