This blog post was written jointly by Steve Utkus and John Ameriks.
Vanguard is not an insurance company, but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate the potential value that some see in having a guaranteed income in retirement.
In fact, you may have heard that Vanguard recently introduced Vanguard Annuity Access™, powered by the Income Solutions® platform. This is an online annuity marketplace where you can compare quotes on comparable fixed annuities from a set of leading insurers. The program is designed to facilitate easy, apples-to-apples comparisons among different annuity contracts, with the highest degree of fee transparency possible. This new service may be very helpful to those people seeking the kind of income guarantees an annuity can provide.
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The current economic recovery is weak, but that’s hardly news. There are many explanations for this meager improvement, but perhaps one of the most telling is a large jump in personal savings in the United States.
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I can’t sing a lick, but a tune from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific came to mind as I was thinking about the pervasive pessimism in so much economic and market commentary.
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I recently had the chance to reread A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel as part of a work-related book club.
Having read the book in a business school class very early in my career, I promptly ignored its advice and became a securities analyst (a profession about which he makes a few disparaging remarks!) charged with analyzing companies and making buy-and-sell recommendations. I was guilty of most of the shortcomings Dr. Malkiel points to (for example, trying to pick winners), but at least I got to visit an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Read more »
My recent post on the government’s fiscal outlook generated several thoughtful comments.
Two readers mentioned Paul Krugman’s op-ed on Social Security in The New York Times. It is true, as Krugman points out, that Social Security is only a modest part of the fiscal problem. Using statistics from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), federal spending on health programs and Social Security is expected to grow from 10% of GDP to 16% over the next quarter century. About 1% of that growth is due to Social Security, according to CBO; the other 5% is due to health programs.
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