Albert Edwards, the outspoken global strategist at Société Générale, is sounding the alarm over Boomer-driven spending habits in the UK and France, blaming decades of policy choices for deepening intergenerational strife and sabotaging Gen Z’s economic prospects. In a LinkedIn post, he highlighted “shocking charts” from the Financial Times‘ data journalist John Burn-Murdoch, which showed runaway spending from both governments on citizens older than 65.
“Inter-generational tension is not just because boomers have got rich from QE driving asset prices higher, especially housing,” Edwards wrote, nodding to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s firefighting after the 2008 and 2020 financial crises in the form of “QE,” or quantitative easing, and the by-now standard argument that this inflated asset prices and disproportionately benefitted older and already wealthy people around the world. According to Edwards, the charts show policy choices are robbing the young to soothe the old. “In the UK and especially France, pensioners have broken the public finances in two of the countries who can least afford it. Bonkers!”
Edwards’ call to action should be familiar to followers of his work, recommending drastic changes to fix what he perceives as massive failures in how capitalism is working in the 2020s. Edwards, who is British himself, commented that Burn-Murdoch’s research on how incomes and government spending are higher for both countries’ post-65 populations shows how “politicians in France and the UK (in particular) are cowed into political submission by already wealthy, Baby Boomers.” Edwards’ recommendation: “We ‘need’ a fiscal crisis for politicians to be able to act.”
The permabear, the ice age, and the plight of Gen Z
The Financial Times‘ Alphaville calls Edwards a “provocative and voluble strategist” and reminds readers of his two famous arguments: a longstanding “ice age” theory, that the “Japanification” crisis of the 1990s will make its way to the U.S. and Europe some day, and being a “permabear” on stocks. He told Alphaville in 2024 that back in 1996, while working at Dresdner Kleinwort, he concluded that “what was playing out in Japan would also play out in the west, with a lag … basically like the secular stagnation thesis.”
That thesis, of course, was reintroduced into economic debate in 2013 by Larry Summers, who was then at Harvard, had previously served as Treasury Secretary, and had just recently withdrawn his name for consideration to chair the Federal Reserve. At a speech before the International Monetary Fund in November 2013, Summers praised the Fed’s crisis prevention efforts, including QE, but raised the possibility that zero nominal interest rates had become normalized and that economic growth and innovation was proving difficult. Economist Alvin Hansen had invented the phrase in 1938 while attempting to explain sluggish growth following the Great Depression, but Summers revived it for the 21st century. Slower population growth and less technological progress would hold back wage increases, full employment, and general economic expansion, Hansen predicted.
To be sure, the economic situation in 2025 is far removed from zero interest rates and the economy has been battling with inflation running too hot instead of too low, while nearly full employment has been a feature of the U.S. economy since the dramatic economic recovery from the pandemic. At the same time, young workers around the world are battling a rising sense of “despair,” according to economists David Blanchflower and Alex Bryson, who talked to Fortune about their research suggesting that the midlife crisis is becoming a thing of the past.
Blanchflower and Bryson note young worker despair is not driven by a decline in wages, as the ratio of the youth wage to older workers has increased and real wages have also been on the rise. Other findings do fit with Burn-Murdoch’s research, as other costs have added to despair such as the relative prices of housing, healthcare, and student debt. Blanchflower told Fortune that the research shows a worsening of reported mental health since the mid-2010s. Once you rule out wages or unemployment as causes for despair, Blanchflower said he thinks young workers are basically saying “this job sucks.” Maybe, Edwards’ and Burn-Murdoch observe, there’s justified anger about government spending on the older and wealthier.
The intergenerational tensions in Asia are downright explosive. A “Gen Z” protest in Nepal, which broke out after bans for Instagram, TikTok and other social media, has escalated to the point where Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has resigned. The Financial Times notes a “growing regional trend” where elder leads in Oli’s generation—he is 73—are clashing with “disenfranchised, ambitious and often unemployed young people who are fed up with politics as usual and a lack of opportunities.” The Asian median age is 32 and Nepal’s is 25. Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bangladesh have seen similar youth-led uprisings in the 2020s.
Edwards on ‘the end of capitalism’
In April 2023, with inflation elevated for several years in a manner that Apollo Global Management’s Torsten Sløk recently likened to an “inflation mountain,” Edwards had another take: The greed on display from corporations was simply unacceptable. “The end of Greedflation must surely come,” Edwards wrote, commenting on the phenomenon of companies reporting record profit margins while pleading helplessness on inflation. “Otherwise, we may be looking at the end of capitalism,” he warned. “This is a big issue for policymakers that simply cannot be ignored any longer.”
Edwards wrote at the time that corporations, particularly in developed economies like the U.S. and UK, had been using rising raw material costs amid the pandemic and the war in Ukraine as an “excuse” to raise prices. After four decades of working in finance, he added, he had never seen anything resembling the “unprecedented” and “astonishing” levels of corporate Greedflation in that economic cycle.
Just as he called for a fiscal crisis to focus minds on the intergenerational warfare taking place in government spending patterns, in 2023 he called for a controversial solution to fix greedflation, as he had “weakening confidence” in how capitalism was working. “Those of us who lived through the failed prices and incomes policies of the 1970s” would hesitate to embrace price controls, Edwards wrote, but that is exactly the tool to solve this kind of problem.