Allison Schrager
Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor at City Journal. Her work focuses on economics, including public finance, pensions, tax policy, labor markets, and monetary policy, and she is the author of An Economist Walks Into a Brothel.
Blocked Homeownership Is Pushing Gen Z Toward Riskier Trades
Bloomberg argues that young investors’ turn toward meme stocks, options, crypto and gambling-adjacent markets is less a simple taste for risk than a response to blocked financial milestones. Justina Lee, Allison Schrager, Charlie Wells and others frame Gen Z’s trading posture as shaped by unaffordable housing, weaker early-career prospects, social-media wealth cues and a long bull market that has made high-risk bets feel both accessible and necessary.
A 30-Year Retirement Requires Income, Not Just Savings
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Karen Andres, Allison Schrager, Jaime Magyera, Thasunda Duckett and Ida Rademacher framed longer lifespans as an affordability problem for a retirement system still built around shorter lives, uneven workplace access and account balances rather than dependable income. Their central argument was that a 100-year life requires more than urging households to save more: plans must start earlier, use automatic defaults, preserve liquidity, widen access and embed guaranteed income before retirement.