financial literacy ancillary 9

The topic I am choosing to examine for WP4 are financial crises, but more extensively, financial literacy for individuals and government roles in regulating financial institutions. The background I have on this issue are pegs on the 1880, 1929, 1987, and 2008 stock market crashes, as well as the recent GameStop short squeeze. Furthermore, I know that some individuals save for old age using Roth IRA’s, 401K’s, traditional IRA’s, and other retirement plans. However, an issue with this is that it’s only accessible to people who have the time and means to understand these tax documents. For these people as well, they can easily access the stock market through brokerages. For many Americans, saving for retirement and the future is difficult, time consuming, and tedious, but it allows them the flexibility to have a comfortable retirement. There needs to be more programs, whether government sponsored or other, that helps everyday people become financially literate and do due diligence for their own savings. Social security can act as a safety net for low-income individuals, but people who have the means should save so that they don’t need to depend on an insolvent social security system in the future. I am interested in exploring this topic further to learn more other systems or solutions to help retired individuals have enough money to live comfortably, especially in other countries with more or less robust government programs. I also want to explore more about the private democratization of finance, especially with companies like Robinhood; I would also like to learn about how cryptocurrency changes the outlook of this market and the policy gaps that the government needs to address in order for finance to democratize fairly with platforms like Robinhood. Some debates that I know about are whether the government should be regulating more or less of private platforms like Robinhood, as many robinhood users could not claim gains due to robinhood’s terms of service in massive market spikes like Gamestop. Another debate is whether the government should allow cryptocurrency to be widely distributed — and to relate to financial literacy, if cryptocurrency should be an avenue for people to save assets for retirement.