💸 Good luck, Gen X

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Tonight: If you're worried about not having enough in your retirement account, well, at least you have company. Plus: London's commercial real estate is falling down, and Donald Trump is hoping auto workers overlook his decidedly anti-union record. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

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Last updated September 27 at 7:44 PM ET

👛 SAVING? IN THIS ECONOMY?

The children of the 1970s and 80s are now in their 40s and 50s, and they account for about a fifth of the US population. They're the next generation in line to retire after Boomers.

But, as my colleague Jeanne Sahadi reports, Gen X is, by and large, financially unprepared for retirement. And that doesn't bode well for Millennials, the largest generation group in America, who'll retire after Gen X.

Here's the deal: A report from the National Institute on Retirement Security suggests that many Gen Xers simply aren't building enough savings to maintain their standard of living when they retire.

That's because Gen X came of age around the same time as the now-standard DIY retirement planning trend. (Or you might call it the "Boomers pulling up the ladder behind them" trend.)

The Reality Bites generation was the first to enter the labor market after most companies shifted from employer-run defined benefit pension plans to 401(k)-style defined contribution accounts.

Only 14% of working Gen X adults are in a defined benefit pension plan, according to the NIRS report, which analyzed 2020 data from the federal Survey of Income and Program Participation.

As for savings in workplace retirement plans and IRAs, "the bottom half of [Gen X] earners have only a few thousand dollars saved," authors of the NIRS report wrote. And the median amount that Gen X households have in retirement savings is just $40,000.

Unsurprisingly, the single biggest factor in determining who has enough savings is income. But even among higher earnings, the report suggest Gen X may be behind.

On top of that, current projections suggest that if no action is taken, Social Security will only be able to pay 80% of promised benefits by 2034, which is when Gen Xers will have begun retiring.

In theory, Millennials have more time to turn things around. But they're even less likely to have a pension, less likely to benefit from Social Security, and they're going to live longer. And still, most Millennials (66%) have nothing saved for retirement.

"With their increased life expectancy, lower income replacement from Social Security, and a lower likelihood of having a traditional defined benefit pension, this generation will need to save significantly more than previous generations in order to maintain their lifestyle during retirement," researchers found in another report by the National Institute on Retirement Security. "In fact, recommendations from many financial experts indicate that Millennials will need to put aside 15% to 22% of their salary—which is double the recommendation made to previous generations."

Bottom line: How much any individual should have saved by retirement depends on many factors — including what age they retire, their marital status, where and how they plan to live, etc. But what the NIRS studies make clear is that the system that allowed Boomers to thrive has rapidly eroded. Boomers may have had to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but their children's boots went up in the flames of the Great Recession.

So in short, you're not alone if you're worried about not saving enough. Check out Jeanne's full story for some sage wisdom on how to fix it.

NUMBER OF THE DAY

$181 million

London's commercial real estate market has plunged into a "rental recession," with the share of empty space hitting its highest level in three decades, investment bank Jefferies said in a note Wednesday.

Offices in the city were last this empty in 1993, when the UK economy was in recession and its real estate market had crashed. Now, vast tranches of the capital's once-bustling business districts are gathering dust because of the persistence of remote work more than three years after the pandemic.

Jefferies estimates that utilization of the city's offices has fallen 20% since the end of 2019.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, just a shelled out $181 million to break its lease on a 310,000-square-foot office near London's Regent's Park. That move comes three months after HSBC announced plans to move out of its global headquarters in Canary Wharf and take up a much smaller building closer to London's city center.

🇺🇸 THE ANTI-UNION POTUS

Donald Trump arrived in Michigan on Wednesday with a lot more support among blue-collar union members than most Republican presidential candidates before him.

But his record as president is decidedly anti-union, my colleague Chris Isidore writes. And in case that wasn't already obvious: Trump was scheduled to speak at a non-union auto parts manufacturer outside of Detroit in the midst of one of the biggest work stoppages in the industry's history.

"He's not supportive of workers' right to organize, bargain collectively or strike," said Cathy Creighton, a National Labor Relations Board attorney during the Clinton administration who now serves as the head of the Buffalo office of Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. "Other Republican presidents said they were pro-business, or that they think labor has too much power. He tells working Americans he's on their side when everything he did was anti-union."

Let's take a look back at those Trump years...

As president, Trump appointed NLRB members who made it more difficult for unions to win representation at nonunion workplaces, and who effectively slowed unionization efforts to give management more time to campaign against organizers.

(The Biden NLRB has rolled back those rules after they were struck down in court, and it is moving to make it easier for a union to organize.)

The Supreme Court also issued a devastating ruling against public sector unions, with Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, providing the deciding fifth vote.

Trump promised he would impose steep tariffs on vehicles coming from Mexico, a promise he is making again now on the campaign trail. But his 2020 update of the North American Free Trade Agreement included no such tariffs and has done little to change the flow of vehicles across US borders.

While Trump claims he created auto jobs and that the Biden administration is destroying them, that is simply not the case.

Michigan lost 1,900 auto manufacturing jobs, or 4% of the total, between 2017 and 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state gained 1,800 auto jobs from February 2021, Biden's first month in office, through February of this year.

"I see no point in meeting with him because I don't think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for," UAW President Shawn Fain told CNN on Tuesday, shortly after meeting with President Biden on the picket line. "He serves the billionaire class and that's what's wrong with our country."

But Team Trump says the union leadership doesn't necessarily speak for rank-and-file members.

"The reality is that there's a disconnect between the political leadership of some of the labor unions and the working middle class employees that they purport to represent," Trump senior campaign adviser Jason Miller told CNN.

About 40% of autoworkers supported Trump in the last election, said Art Wheaton, the director of labor studies at Cornell University's ILR school in Buffalo. Trump's rhetoric — taking a tough line on imports or his criticism of EVs, which are seen as a threat to union jobs — has played well with union members, according to labor experts.

READ MORE

The UAW is preparing to announce a possible expansion of its strike against automakers this Friday if there isn't more progress in talks, a union source familiar with plans said Wednesday.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

🛢 US oil prices topped $94 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time in over a year, threatening to push up prices at the pump and inflation across the economy. (CNN)

🏦 Shares of UBS plunged Wednesday following a Bloomberg report that the Swiss bank faces a widening probe by the US Department of Justice over suspected compliance failures that allowed Russian clients to evade sanctions. (CNN)

👀 Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the company's new $500 Meta 3 headset. (CNN)

📱 X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, scrapped a feature that lets users self-report political misinformation on the platform, a research group said. (CNN)

💸 A large options position owned by a JPMorgan equity fund has the potential to add fuel to this sweeping US stock selloff, some Wall Street observers say. (Bloomberg)