U.S. president-elect Joe Biden has sketched out ambitious plans to reinvigorate the pandemic-battered economy. But without addressing a festering savings crisis, efforts to revitalize the middle class are doomed to fail.

The U.S. savings and retirement system is broken, and desperately needs an overhaul to give Americans an opportunity to build lifetime financial resilience.

The economic ravages of a pandemic mean that a national conversation in the U.S. on change is imperative, starting with ways to move towards more universal access to auto-enroll savings and retirement schemes. Moreover, we need to increase our focus on providing real-time data and financial health scores so it’s easier for people to make good decisions.

A lesson from this past year is pretty simple: There is no normal in our intricately connected, swiftly-evolving global economy. What happens in Wuhan can upend Chicago, and more unexpected black swan events will probably emerge in the coming years.

Add to that the economic tumult of unprecedented technological change, which has been accelerated by the pandemic. We have seen millions of good jobs—in travel and leisure and retail—disappear virtually overnight. In a turbulent 21st-century economy, the health of an individual’s balance sheet is a critical buffer.

Too many Americans are short on savings and drowning in debt. Our own research found that more than three-quarters of U.S. households nearing retirement had virtually no chance of meeting their income needs. It is also a generational problem.

In 1990, when baby boomers reached a median age of 35, they owned 21% of the US economy’s wealth; that percentage has continued to climb to more than 55%.

The smaller Generation X, now in their 40s and 50s, still owns less than 20%. But the crunch befalls the millennial generation. As they approach a median age of 35, millennials control only 3.2% of the nation’s wealth—despite accounting for a bigger percentage of the population than the boomers.

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