Roger W. Ferguson, CEO of financial services giant TIAA-CREF and one of the nation’s leading economists, was recently named to President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, the influential body charged with providing recommendations on remaking America’s battered economy.
The former vice chairman of the board of governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve System recently sat down with Black Enterprise magazine to discuss the economy, investing, and how to make sense of this recession in an article that will appear in the July issue.
Here are some of the outtakes from that interview:
Black Enterprise: From an economic standpoint, do you expect more of the same for the remainder of 2009? Are you looking at 2010 as a turnaround year?
Roger W. Ferguson: I think there are some clear signs of a turnaround towards the end of this year but I think the risk around that might be too optimistic. I don’t expect to be surprised with a turnaround this quarter or next quarter. I may be surprised by seeing a turnaround that is delayed toward the first quarter of 2010.
But in the meantime with all the turbulence in the market, what sort of things are you telling clients these days?
We’re telling them a number of things. First we’re telling our clients to remain calm, do not make rash decisions, do not make short term decisions that they will regret in the long term. We certainly are telling them, obviously, to reach out for advice, so don’t make decisions on your own. And once we get into the mode where we are advising, I think our general perspective is think about their long term plans, what they’d like to see for their future, how much appetite they have for risk. And we remind them of some basic rules about investing. So, certainly, broad diversification still counts. Do not run away from
equities. Do not run to fixed income or vice versa. Secondly, obviously, think about, again, the long term horizon. That’s sort of the range of things we’re telling them.Let’s say I’m 60 years old and looking at retiring soon. My 401(k) has gotten hammered. What would you tell me if I asked you for advice?
Well, three things. One is there certainly is a reality — a number of people in that position are certainly going to have to think about postponing their retirement for a short period of time.
The second thing is, whenever you retire, whether it’s as you originally planned or longer, don’t let that change in your retirement plans change your big plan about how you’re going to live in retirement. Because whenever you retire you will live, given what’s happening with demographics, another 25 or 30 years in retirement, so you still have to think about that as a very long period of time.
The third is continue to keep track of the basic ground rules of investing, saving and spending. Investments still have to be diversified. The nature of diversification might change as you get older, but the rules of diversification are still important.
Particularly for retired people, you have to plan on inflation and inflation risks, so that’s one of the components of diversification. Obviously you have to really think about unexpected expenses in retirement, such as healthcare, and plan for that.
For people who are 60 or older, it may be too late to start saving, but generally speaking, planning for unexpected expenses and often healthcare expenses is the second leg of thinking about retirement.
You also have to think about what your basic must-have expenditures are going to be, for shelter, clothing, etc., and have a guaranteed income for those, and then maybe have one for things that are discretionary, perhaps more variable income.
That translates into having a
good annuity for the basic expenditures where you really need guaranteed income for life. Then have other sources for the kind of expenditures in retirement that are much more discretionary, like travel.What is going to lead us out of the recession? We were once a manufacturing-based economy — we could build anything and people wanted it. Do you think clean tech is the direction manufacturing will go?
I think manufacturing will go more in that direction because that is what the consumer is demanding. At the end of the day, those who are producing produce what it is that consumers want. So, since there is now such a heightened interest and concern about the economy and also about the environment, those two things I think will go together and there will be a real desire to have more green manufacturing, more clean tech, and probably other industries that we don’t even perceive of right now.