I’ve heard a lot that there is a financial crash coming from the stock market due to baby boomers retiring and the fact that the Fed reserve bank keeps printing fiat currency. What happens to forex if money no longer is able to purchase anything like it did in Germany after WWII (I believe) where a wheelbarrow load couldn’t buy you a loaf of bread?
So many websites and videos on Youtube have been predicting a stock market crash for the last five years. Somehow the financial system hasn’t collapsed, it’d be wise to invest in precious metals and bitcoin for protection from such events
Yep, the wheelbarrow analogy is correct, the effects of that period of hyper inflation can still be seen in the market today.
Germany resisted the ECB’s QE program, good chance they are encouraging the taper talk right now.
J Weidmann regularly makes known his dislike of QE (money printing) - in his most recent public statement in Frankfurt on 26/09/16 he said that there is “a whole row of economic reasons” against QE.
(btw it was after ww1)
“Paper” money, i.e. currency units like a dollar or a euro ultimately have to reflect the real value of the economic condition of the country that issues it, although the relationship is very loose and takes time to balance out. But ultimately if a government simply prints more notes than the country is worth (or in previous times, the amount of a commodity such as gold or silver backing it) then it results in high inflation and then hyper inflation as more and money money chases the same amount of goods and services. Then the real value of the currency unit drops rapidly and the value and purchase power of people’s earnings and savings plunge accordingly. This creates pressure to spend money as quickly as possible thus creating even more downward pressure on its value as people try to convert their money into goods and commodities.
Gradually, the authorities issue larger and larger denomination notes and then at some stage devalue the currency and knock a few zeros off the notes in a new issue.
Eventually, one side effect of this is that people like me that collect banknotes become multi-trillionaires!!! - at least in nominal units! 
Here are a couple of good examples (both notes worth only a few cents in Euros). I am not sure, but I think the Zimbabwe note for 100 trillion Zimbabwe Dollars is the highest denomination note ever - I should check that…the other is an old Jugoslavian note.
Actually, according to Google, the world’s largest denomination note is this beautiful Hungarian note from 1946 for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Pengo:
More about post-war Hungary:
Adopengo (tax pengo) was introduced between January and July 1946. Initially, it was used for tax and postal payments, but later was also used concurrent with Pengo for general circulation. The value of the adopengo was adjusted each day, by radio announcement. On January 1, 1946 one adopengo equaled one pengo. By late July, one adopengo equaled 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Pengo. The highest denomination issued was 100,000,000 Adopengo.
In the mid-1946 currency reform, 1 Forint was exchanged for 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Pengo. Forint is now pegged to Euro.
Babyboomers retiring is not nearly the same as a country completely devastated by a war, I doubt things will get that bad.
I also doubt very much that babyboomers will have that kind of effect, although they do/will create an adverse and disproportional effect on health costs. But they also do tend to have decent pensions and a willingness to spend them.
My fears tend to lie with future generations of pensioners that are [I]not [/I]currently accumulating for themselves [I]any [/I]kind of pension due to changes in employment methods. These are creating (at least in my country) a whole generation of people who often work casual hours, short-term contracts, and low pay. These people are already accumulating only negligible pension rights that wont even exceed the government minimum level when they retire. When this generation retires they will have insufficient income to cope without subsidies, will outnumber current workforces and will live much longer whilst requiring many more healthcare services which, by nature, are significantly more expensive than average health costs
Here, too - and I suspect in many countries. It’s “party conference season” at the moment, and the media reporting on proceedings are full of discussions about casual hours, short-term contracts, “zero-hours contracts” and low pay.
(My grandparents are “babyboomers”!).
And they are surely exceedingly proud of their grandchild(ren)!
…don’t you have a birthday sometime soon?
Soon[I]ish[/I] … but once we’ve “done” 26, women are allowed to start counting backwards (I know it’s in the by-laws, somewhere), so I’ve decided to be 25 again, anyway. 
Age is a relative concept and if you had been born in, for example, Korea you would already be 27 approaching 28 as they are 1 year at birth!
Besides, if you were 126 you would still be just as wise, intelligent and socially considerate as you are now but hopefully also infinitely more wealthy due to your trading success! 
Does that mean forex would become obsolete? Or can we still profit from such a crash?
Interesting question and for all of us this is the key question.
Presumably, none of us will ever take delivery of notes of a currency we “buy”, we’re actually only speculating (betting) on the movement of the ratio between two currencies, the base and the counter. If the counter currency continues to devalue quickly, then, barring the intervention of the base currency’s central bank or your own brokerage or local forex regulator, the ratio remains intact and is tradable. In fact it offers a once in a lifetime opportunity to buy the pair.
This casts us in the uncomfortable role of greedy speculator, profiting from an issue which causes others great difficulties and/or ruin. But that’s life.
However most likely market maker brokers will stop trading such pairs and no one will “buy” such currency. Recently I was talking with a guy who believe that his country (Lebanon) currency soon will go south in a hyperinflation (or at least very high inflation). I hope that he is mistaken, but who knows we may have the opportunity to trade a hyperinflation currency…
Nice tip WalkerDim, thanks. At least for those who trade the Lebanese pound.
I suspect brokers will simply remove a crashing pair from their offerings until price stabilises. That would control their exposure to risk (and may even help stabilise the currency?) so the opportunity would probably be very temporary. What I don’t see is that if market players outside Lebanon have actual LBP which they want to sell in a crash, who’s going to stop them, and how?