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Old People Will Crash The Economy

So says Stanley Druckenmiller, a retired hedge fund skrillionaire who was formerly the chief strategist for George Soros, who has made a few pennies here and there over the years. The problem? Runaway entitlements for the elderly. Excerpts: Stan Druckenmiller, one of the best- performing hedge fund managers of the past three decades, has a […]

So says Stanley Druckenmiller, a retired hedge fund skrillionaire who was formerly the chief strategist for George Soros, who has made a few pennies here and there over the years. The problem? Runaway entitlements for the elderly. Excerpts:

Stan Druckenmiller, one of the best- performing hedge fund managers of the past three decades, has a warning for the youth of America: Don’t let your grandparents steal your money.

Druckenmiller, 59, said the mushrooming costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, with unfunded liabilities as high as $211 trillion, will bankrupt the nation’s youth and pose a much greater danger than the country’s $16 trillion of debt currently being debated in Congress.

“While everybody is focusing on the here and now, there’s a much, much bigger storm that’s about to hit,” Druckenmiller said in an hour-long interview with Stephanie Ruhle on Bloomberg Television’s Market Makers. “I am not against seniors. What I am against is current seniors stealing from future seniors.”

Druckenmiller said unsustainable spending will eventually result in a crisis worse than the financial meltdown of 2008, when $29 trillion was erased from global equity markets. What’s particularly troubling, he said, is that government expenditures related to programs for the elderly rocketed in the past two decades, even before the first baby boomers, those born in 1946, started turning 65.

Druckenmiller stopped managing money for outside clients in 2010 after three decades in the business, including more than a decade as chief strategist for billionaire George Soros. From 1986 through 2010 he produced average annual returns of 30 percent, one of the best long-term track records in the industry.

Do you see any politically feasible way of stopping this runaway train from going off into the gorge? Me neither.

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