The so-called “silver tsunami” — referring to some kind of “rush” of older people into certain places, out of the workforce or to their housing stock, depending on who you talk to — is likely to have serious economic ramifications with negative potential, or a lot of upside potential due to the ways in which the economy must respond.
This is according to a column published recently by the New York Times, and seeing it as either a crisis or an opportunity depends on who you speak to about it, according to Times finance writer Rob Copeland.
According to some, the silver tsunami is a disaster-in-waiting that will “upend life, work and retirement,” the column said. “An uptick in use of the barometrically inflected term nods to what some see as an unstoppable demographic disaster caused by the confluence of a wave of retirees and relative dearth of young people.”
But for some members of the business community, the eventual exit of baby boomers from the workforce and a shift into retirement has led companies to encourage investors “to put money into the initial public offering for a pharmacy focused on long-term care facilities — an aging populace will need more drugs is the argument — to sell investment management products to teetering public pensions and to explain why chains increasingly see opportunity in buying up businesses from the mammoth tide of independent proprietors who are retiring.”
Some see the phrase itself as derisive, the column noted. The Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. called it “fatalistic and negative,” urging discontinuation of its use in writing. But with entities including the United Nations and the National Cancer Institute using it to describe the overarching phenomenon, it seems hard to shake, the column noted.
But sometimes, the term is used to corroborate theories that appear diametrically opposed. In November, Copeland noted the phrase first appeared on his radar when “an investor used it in predicting a housing market collapse caused by an imminent wave of retirees downsizing.”
But it was then used to justify the potential for “a sustained increase in home prices because older Americans are increasingly choosing to stay in their longtime abodes rather than move to senior living communities,” referring to the overriding desire for seniors to age in place in their own homes.
