This article looks at how many countries in the European Union are having troubles with getting their citizens to invest in retirement programs. As stated in the article, "A new report from the European Federation of Financial Services Users reveals how bad things have been. It finds that, for many savers in Belgium, Britain, France, Italy and Spain, the real (after inflation) returns from private pension schemes have been negative for much of this century." Some examples that were given from the article were pension plans in Spain lost 1.2% a year in real terms between 2000 and 2013. Another example is one French equity fund returned just 16% after charges over ten years, compared with a gain for the index it was tracking of 73%. One of the more astonishing parts about this was the fact that the it was very hard for the researchers to obtain the figures because of the, "complexity of pension savings taxation in EU countries makes it also extremely difficult to compute after-tax returns.” This is a problem for governments that are trying to get their citizens to buy into retirement programs, so that they were lest dependent on the government when they retire.
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21621883-european-savers-have-suffered-terrible-returns-pension-funds-prudence
Could you imagine if this was happening in the United States? People have been blindly throwing money into their Social Security funds for years now, and we see that with the baby boomers reaching retirement, it is very likely that this program is on it's last leg. It's simply not financially plausible.
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