US has 2MILLION more retirees than predicted as COVID shutdowns lead elderly to quit work and leave employers scrambling to fill rolls

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Daily Mail

A wave of retirements has hit the US leaving companies scrambling to fill roles and more Americans enjoying time without work. 

There are about 2million more people who have retired than official forecasts predicted.

The percentage of the adult population in retirement has soared from 15 percent in 2007 to just under 20 percent, accelerating steeply since 2020 and defying predictions by the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

 

'While the gap seemed to be closing earlier in the year, it seems to have widened slightly since then,' Miguel Faria-e-Castro of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis told Bloomberg.

'As of September, we estimate about 1.98 million excess retirees.'

 

Half the wealth in the US is now held by people born before 1965, a study found this summer, helped by decades of surging house prices and falls in relative wages for younger people.

But with unemployment below 4 percent for the longest time in 50 years, employers are feeling the pressure from a tight labor market and eyeing opportunities to tempt seniors back into the workforce.

More than 2,500 businesses, including Bank of America, Microsoft and H&R Block have signed the AARP pledge to build an age-inclusive workforce with the number of new signatures more than doubling over the last year