Good morning. How dire is America’s fiscal outlook? When I met with MassMutual CEO Roger Crandall yesterday, he framed the problem with a startling statistic: “Ten dollars a day. That’s how much your share of the U.S. debt is going up every day,” he said. “For tax‑paying Americans, it’s more than $25 a day.”
Escalating public debt can affect everything from currency valuations to corporate borrowing costs, not to mention the harm it can do to workers, consumers, and growth. Crandall brings a unique perspective: he not only leads a 175-year-old mutual insurance company that serves more than 4 million customers with over $1 trillion in coverage, but he also chaired the Boston Fed through the end of last year. “Everything we have today was built for a 40‑hour-a-week, full‑time job with a lot of benefits provided, which made sense for a world where people lived to 70 or 80,” he noted. “We’re heading to a society where people live for 100 years, and we haven’t really prepared for that. It doesn’t take much to create a new normal that’s not a good normal for the country.”
And how should we address all this? One thing he and I discussed was the power of compounding—the reality that early investing is a powerful tool that more Americans need to deploy. The Trump saving accounts for children, whatever the drawbacks in design, are a powerful step in that direction. Employers could be doing more to fund the accounts and encourage young people to invest in their 401(k)s. (The Trump Administration is now reportedly looking at Australia’s mandated retirement-savings system as a model for revamping our system.)
Crandall benefits from a business model in which his company is owned by its members and participating policyholders, which makes it inherently multigenerational and focused on investing in the future. Like other life insurers, he now offers a wellness component at no cost. “It’s basically three things: a mental‑health app, a blood test for cancer, and a blood test around genetic predisposition,” he said, noting that giving policyholders more tools to invest in their own health boosts engagement and the bottom line. “The benefits we saw from the wellness rider were so big it made sense for us to pay for it.”
As for the resilience and health of the U.S. economy, Crandall believes the solution will likely come from Congress—if not in 2028, then by 2032. In the meantime, leaders can be doing more to create the conditions for their workers to invest in their own financial health, whether it’s actively promoting retirement savings to younger employees or creating more flexible work arrangements for those who might otherwise retire. With the U.S. Treasury now paying $24 billion a week in interest on its debt, Americans have to prepare for a long life that they may have to increasingly fund themselves.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
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S&P 500 futures are down 0.07% this morning. The last session closed down 0.79%. The STOXX Europe 600 was down 0.73% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.66% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 0.74%. South Korea’s KOSPI was up 0.73%. China’s CSI 300 was up 2.15%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 0.52%. India’s NIFTY 50 was down 0.67%. Bitcoin was at $64K.
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CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.
