Bought them at dirt cheap prices and they went up 10-30x in value doing nothing. Cheap education, cheap housing, thriving job uncompetitive job market, super generous pensions and social security compared to what every one else will get.
Boomers don’t work any harder than anybody else, but become middle class because they won the birth date lottery.
It’s that simple.
All of this is basic math:
1) When interest rates are low, the value of assets goes up
2) When interest rates are high, the value of assets continues to go up
but not as fast.
For instance, interest rates rose from 2003 until 2007, and then we got The Great Recession in 2007. What lit the fuse was an increase in interest rates that began in 2003 (see attached.)
This begs the question:
Why were interest rates so low, and for so long?
The answer to that is simple: Boomers were the biggest generation in the history of the US, and they saved a lot.
Your argument is that "Boomers drove up the price of everything." But that was nearly impossible to avoid; if you are aware of how it could be avoided, please let me know.
1) The reason that interest rates were so low for so long was because Boomers were saving like crazy, and there were a lot of Boomers
2) But if Boomers
didn't save their money, and spent their paychecks the minute they got the, that would
also cause prices to rise. Because their money would be chasing declining assets like cars.
So it's a Catch-22. If Boomers spent their money on cars and diamond hats, the value of cars and diamond hats would go up. But Boomers were savers; they owned homes and Treasury Bonds and stocks.
The average Boomer retired in 2019, and every year, there are more and more Boomers retiring.
That giant sucking sound you hear, that's the sound of Boomers taking money out of the economy. Up until 2019, they were saving; now they are spending. That causes:
1) Interest rates go up, because Boomers are no longer purchasing Treasuries, they're
selling them.
2) Home price increases are muted because you don't have Boomers buying McMansions any longer AND interest rates went up
3) Most of the stock market has been flat for a while, because Boomers aren't pouring their money into blue chips. You still see stocks like Nvidia going up, but Boomers don't buy Nvidia, they buy AT&T and Verizon... which are down, because Boomers aren't buying any more stocks
If you want a world where prices are flat or falling and interest rates are permanently elevated,
you got it. It's here, and will be here indefinitely, because there isn't another generation that's anywhere as big as Boomers were.