The Survey also covers other great points, like living within your means as a success strategy, but the most surprising point to me is that people feel rich if they have $500,000 (I would expect that to be higher). Happily, the survey indicates that we've passed the point where people are overly worried about their homes declining in value for the most part. This is probably a change from a couple of years ago.
The biggest obstacle to financial security: income (31%). I'm not sure that I agree with that, given some of the other survey results. If you follow the other pages, it would seem that not getting into debt and living within one's means might be key players here, so long as the income is not too meager. But, once there is debt and lifestyle challenges, a low income can become that obstacle.
CNN ran a survey back in 2011 that found that half of Americans did not have $2000 in emergency savings. This new survey concludes that almost two-thirds could handle a $1000 emergency, but only 42% could handle a $10,000 emergency. It seems we still have a way to go as Americans when it comes to saving.
- JSM
There seems to be precious little evidence that fraud or failures of corporate governance contributed in any material way to the Financial Crisis. The absence of fraud prosecutions of the big banks and their employees, notwithstanding the powerful incentives of the administration to bring as many as possible, surely suggests just the opposite. And it's hard to attribute the behavior of the banks to agency costs when it was completely rational and in the shareholders' interests for them to gamble with creditors' monies. On the contrary, all the evidence suggests that the Financial Crisis was primarily due to regulatory failure, in particular, the failure to apply safety and soundness standards to the subprime mortgage business (a failure that is continuing to this very day) and the failure to require both the universal banks and investment banks to have much higher levels of equity capital.
ReplyDeleteNigel Jones Solicitor