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Wednesday, December 30, 2015

America's 'children in the basement' won't be moving out any time soon

Moving out of your parents' place is a rite of passage that occurs as you come of age.

When times are tough, it's understandable that one may delay such a move. The global financial crisis was one of these tough periods that forced an increasing percentage of 18- to 34-year-olds to live with their parents. Poor job prospects and massive student-loan debts kept independent living off the table.

But the US economy has been in recovery mode for almost six years, highlighted by a tumbling unemployment rate. And yet the rate at which this demographic cohort is living with their parents remains elevated.

"The share of young adults living with their parents has risen about 4 percentage points (or 3 million individuals) since house prices peaked in 2006," Goldman Sachs' Hui Shan and Daan Struyven observed in a recent note to clients. "The share of 'children in the basement' has not come down recently despite significant improvements seen in the job market."

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps it is because the "tumbling unemployment rate" is bogus. The Obama administration has been lying with those numbers for 7 years, it does not take too much of an investigation to see that when you count people that have totally dropped out of the work force and people that do not have full time jobs, the rate is more like depression era levels around 25%, at least. Also after Johnny gets his liberal arts diploma from McCollege, he can't find a job in 2015 America and he is starting out with a debt level that took 30 years for the previous generation to accumulate.

Anonymous said...

It's a tough situation for the middle generation. Parents have adult children living with them and often elderly parents that need care. The parents won't be able to depend on their children to help them out when they're elderly and since their pensions are disappearing won't have the means to help themselves.

Anonymous said...

don't worry Hillary has a plan