pumpkinstrokemarrow

Less topically of an ex-banker who was rather shocked to find that putting ex-banker on his CV no longer did him any favours. Even in the financial services industry being an ex-banker has the same kind of allure that being fat has elsewhere. Not just youth with neither prospects nor much to lose (apart from membership of their gang) who are cheesed off with bankers continuing to lord it over the rest of us.

However, probably OK to work for a bank, provided that you are not a banker, so I have been reading a statistical report about the world getting old from one. And as usual, I am moved to share a few snippets.

Perhaps most important, the elementary truth that if the level of economic activity falls - if the proportion of people in work falls - the standard of living falls. And if an increasing proportion of the inactive are expensive oldsters, the standard of living falls even faster. We have to get more people into work.

One easy way of doing this was to get even more women into real work, something which the Germans are still rather bad at. They still believe in housefraus, along with some people in this country who believe that having a father at work and a mother at home is the best way to bring up decent children.

And then, talking of expense, there was a chart that showed that old people in the US spend maybe a third of their income on their health, spending which would fall on the taxpayer in most developed countries. So other things being equal, a $ of pension in the US is worth a good deal less than a $ of pension elsewhere. Or put another way, the young do not subsidise the old to the same extent in the US as they do elsewhere.

I was impressed to read that life expectancy at birth in darkest Africa (as a whole) is 57 - some way short of where we are but still some way ahead of where I thought they would be. Things can't be that dark after all. But then I got to wondering about the small print, recalling that there are wrinkles involving whether you count people who are born dead or who die very soon after birth. Or before full term would have been. I wonder how much difference that sort of thing would make?

More worrying for a person of my age was the emphasis placed on uncertainty. We might be living longer on average, but we are very uncertain about how much longer any particular one of us is going to live. Hard for any particular one of us to make suitable provision. So who is going to take on the risk?

Enter the banks with lots of shiny new products and services... Something for the quants to get their teeth into now that old style property based derivatives are out of fashion.