Nearly 20% of Americans now worry that they will never be able to stop working.  Rather than the baby boomer retirement tsunami so recently expected, a trend is developing that has people delaying their retirement.  On average, many federal employees already work for another four years after they become eligible for retirement.

This trend is likely to have negative consequences for already beleaguered financial institutions, many of which have invested tidy sums in building retirement services components.  Sharing the gloom will be retirement community developers, leisure and travel service providers, RV and golf equipment manufacturers, etc.  On the other hand, Social Security and (to some extent) Medicare should see slower-than-anticipated draw-down.

Financial think-tanks are now emphasizing that even one extra year of work can raise your standard of living throughout your retirement and that, while it may not be a good thing emotionally, delaying retirement is always a good thing financially.  Given today's poor market performance, meager investment returns during the first five years of retirement can significantly raise the chance that you'll outlive your money.  And if a single market downturn is highly disruptive to your retirement plans, then you probably weren't financially ready to retire in the first place.

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Under the guidance of T(homas) Boone Pickens, Mesa Petroleum established itself as one of the world's largest independent oil companies between 1973 and 1981.  It was Pickens' repeated attempts to take over companies much larger than his own that led to his and Mesa's greatest fame, however.  In the spring of '82, for instance, he made a play (ultimately unsuccessful but highly profitable) to take over Cities Service, an old-line company more than twenty times the size of Mesa.  (In a remarkable series of transitions, Cities Service became CITGO, was sold to the Southland [7-Eleven] Corporation, and ended up as a government-owned company of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez!)

Fast forward to 2008.  The post-Mesa Pickens, today a hedge-fund billionaire ranked 368th among the world's richest, has unveiled a national energy plan designed to cut US dependence on foreign oil.  While Pickens claims that he's too old and rich to care much about reaping a windfall from this plan, it should be noted that the plan is built around wind energy and natural gas, both areas of heavy Pickens investment.  Still, his ideas have a great deal more practical substance than anything that has emanated or is likely to emanate from Washington any time soon.

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Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former Saudi Arabian oil minister and head of London's Center for Global Energy Studies for eighteen years has a thought-provoking outlook on who's responsible for soaring oil prices--producers or speculators.

Sheik Yamani is likely to live on in quotation dictionaries for the 2001 statement:  "The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil."

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