Where Have All Your Savings Gone?

摘要

For American and European savers it has been a lost decade. After two booms and two busts, stockmarkets have earned them nothing, or less, in the past ten years. Low interest rates have made bonds and bank deposits unrewarding too.rnWere it not for the tax relief they receive, contributors to personal pension plans would have been better off keeping their money under their mattresses. It will be little consolation to Westerners that savers in Japan have known this empty feeling for far longer.rnThis year's figures are enough to put anybody off saving. American mutual-fund assets have declined by $2.4 trillion-a fifth of their value-since the start of 2008; in Britain, the drop is more than a quarter, or almost ￡130 billion ($195 billion). The value of global stockmarkets has shrunk by maybe $30 trillion, or roughly half. These figures put the losses on credit-related securities-where the financial crisis began-into the shade.rnNor has the bad news been confined to equities. This year the value of all manner of risky investments, from corporate bonds to commodities to hedge funds, has been clobbered. The belief that diversification into "alternative assets" could prevent investors losing money in bear markets has proved false. And of course housing, which many people counted on for their retirement nest-eggs, has lost value too (see page 90).rnAs a result, saving seems like pouring money into a black hole (see pages 83-85). Any American who has diligently put $100 a month into a domestic equity mutual fund for the past ten years will find his pot worth less than he put into it; a European who did the same has lost a quarter of his money.