Maddy Dychtwald is a nationally recognized author, co-founder of Age Wave, and a leading expert on the changing demographic trends shaping the marketplace, the workplace and our lives.

Having spent twenty-five years exploring and forecasting lifestyle, marketing and retirement implications of the age wave, she has recently emerged as a renowned authority on the economic ascent of women, including its impact on the financial services industry.

Mark J. Warshawsky is Director of Retirement Research at Towers Watson.

Dr. Warshawsky served as assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department from 2004-2006 and he has held senior level economic research positions at the Federal Reserve Board, the Internal Revenue Service and TIAA-CREF.

In a recent and highly recommended Bloomberg op-ed, Carmen Reinhart discusses the options available to governments and central banks when attempting to deal with the burden of enormous amounts of public and private debt.

Reinhart suggests that the preferred policy option for many governments--including the United States--is a form of stealth taxation that amounts to financial repression.

It seemed obvious several years ago that retirees would shoulder much of the burden of the financial crisis and its residual effects.

While events have generally played-out in line with this projection, the backlash from seniors has been surprisingly subdued.  The lack of pitchforks seems odd given the fact that the number of retirement age voters is increasing by 10,000 each day in the United States.

Warren Buffett’s most recent shareholder letter focuses on the merits of productive assets such as equities in light of the current low interest rate environment and the potential for future inflation.

Buffett’s view is that although productive assets are variable and volatile, they are more likely to preserve future purchasing power than the fixed or currency-based alternatives.

In a Fortune article titled “Why Stocks Beat Gold and Bonds,” Warren Buffett provides a glimpse of his upcoming shareholder letter.

While Buffett’s advice is perfect for investors who have a long-term perspective, anyone near or in retirement may want to think twice about acting on the prescription.

The core of Buffett’s advice is as follows:

The world is filled with investing indexes and benchmarks, and all professional investment managers measure their results relative to some type of performance standard such as the S&P 500.

On the retirement income front, though, similar gauges of performance are virtually non-existent.  The lack of a baseline performance measure is a problem for the industry because there is no established basis for comparison of asset decumulation strategies.

The Treasury Department just released a proposed set of regulations that could have a meaningful impact on the retirement income market in the U.S.

The Treasury’s guidance package builds on feedback received in response to the request for comments issued by the Labor and Treasury Departments last fall.

The proposed regulations appear to be squarely focused on longevity risk.  The basis for this concern—particularly as it pertains to the middle class—is summarized in the following chart:

As the manager of the largest bond fund in the world and a founder of PIMCO, Bill Gross is a leading authority on all things related to yield.

Since retirement finances are fundamentally about generating income from accumulated assets, retirees should care greatly about any comments and insights from Gross.  This is especially true since the world is starved for yield.

Gross regularly shares his insights through commentary on the PIMCO website.

Is there a sense of “swimming upstream” when trying to propagate goal-based investing--as described in your new book Risk Less and Prosper--among existing financial advisors? Conventional practices and economic incentives are so heavily skewed towards modern portfolio theory and growing assets under management.