Here’s some late-breaking news: John McCain and Barack Obama agree on something.

I stumbled across this startling information while reporting on a proposal making the rounds in Washington aimed at creating new retirement saving options for lower-income Americans.

Called the Automatic IRA, it could keep millions of Americans out of poverty in old age. It gets at one of the toughest challenges to retirement saving–the simple fact that half of the country’s working population doesn’t have access to a workplace retirement savings plan.

The Automatic IRA concept enjoys bi-partisan support. It proposes creation of a new retirement savings vehicle for the 75 million Americans who don’t have access to 401(k) plans where they work. That’s because they work for employers–mostly small businesses–that don’t sponsor 401(k) plans, mainly due to the expense of administering and matching contributions.

A number of retirement policy experts believe the solution lies in creating a public-private IRA option for these workers–a defined contribution cousin to the Social Security system.

Several proposals are floating around but one of the most interesting is the Automatic IRA plan proposed by a group called the Retirement Security Project (RSP). It’s a non-partisan organization whose principals include two of the nation’s top experts on retirement policy–J. Mark Iwry of the (liberal) Brookings Institution and David C. John of the (conservative) Heritage Foundation.

Read more about the Automatic IRA in this week’s RetirementRevised column.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that hardship withdrawals from 401(k) accounts are rising and that investors are showing other signs of pulling back from the market amidst the current turmoil. According to WSJ, the signs include cutbacks in contributions to retirement accounts, shifts away from stocks toward fixed income vehicles and outright hardship withdrawals–despite the 10 percent penalties these withdrawals incur.

There’s no solid data available yet on withdrawals over the past week. But David Wray, president of the Profit Sharing/401(k) Council of America, tells me that while hardship withdrawals are up year-to-date, the overall numbers remain below 2 percent of all investors–an “extremely low” number. “There’s no evidence of people making significant reductions in their contributions to plans,” Wray says.

“People are concerned but the typical experience we’ve seen with 401k accounts is that people stay the course. We’ve been through this before in 2000 to 2002, which was considerably worse due to 9/11 and other financial troubles. At that time the 401(k) system remained stable. It’s an island of stability in a sea of uncertainty.”

According to Fidelity Investments–which has one of the industry’s largest databases of investor statistics–the percentage of workers with a balance in their workplace savings plan taking a hardship withdrawal for an immediate or severe financial need was up slightly to 0.60 percent in the three months ended June 30, 2008, as compared to 0.56 percent in the same period in 2007.

Fidelity said that the numbers for people initiating a loan from their workplace savings plan during the three months ended June 2008 was 2.8 percent, down from 3.1 percent at the end of June 2007.

With the harrowing news out of Wall Street the past couple weeks, I have no doubt stress is mounting among retirement investors. But hardship withdrawals are related more directly to dire personal household finance situations resulting from joblessness, home foreclosure and the like–not market turmoil. If the economy retreats even further as the year progresses, we’ll probably see hardship withdrawals jump further.

I outlined the reasons for avoiding hardship withdrawals if you possibly can at RetirementRevised in May.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is wading into the global challenge of aging populations in a big way. The WEF commissioned Mercer, the global benefits consulting firm, to do scenario modeling on how societies might respond to the challenges of health and pension financing for increasingly elderly global populations. The aim is to help governments, individuals, employers and the healthcare and financial service industries to think through the issues and prepare for the future, according to WEF/Mercer.

The WEF/Mercer report should provide some interesting fodder for discussion at the Silver Market Phenomenon symposium coming up  October 2-3 in Tokyo, where I’ll be attending, presenting and doing some reporting.

Scenario analysis looks at various possible outcomes from different policy actions, and can be a powerful tool for decision-makers when it’s used to get a more complete understanding of how various decisions impact outcomes. Here’s how WEF/Mercer describe the global aging challenge:

In many countries around the world, a rapidly ageing population is putting severe pressure on pension and healthcare systems. The demographic time bomb is ticking in both developed and less developed countries.

The UN expects that by 2050, the old-age dependency ratio at a global level will have more than doubled; from 11 elderly persons per 100 working age persons in 2007 to 25 elderly persons per 100 working age persons in 2050. In some countries, the pressures of an ageing population will be even stronger. For example, in China the old-age dependency ratio is expected to rise from 11% to 39% in 2050, in Germany from 29% to 50%, and in Japan and Italy from about 30% to 70%.

These figures mean that one of the key global challenges is the financial sustainability of public pension and healthcare systems in rapidly ageing societies across the world. In addition, challenges in many less developed countries include the lack of formal social security, the diminishing role of families in old-age care, and underdeveloped private pension and health insurance markets.

The report is titled “The Future of Pensions and Healthcare in a Rapidly Ageing World: Scenarios to 2030. It describes three scenarios; the two key variables are global economic growth rates and social/political attitudes. You can download the full report here [large pdf file]. A page describing the initiative is here.

A second phase of work is getting underway, involving workshops to discuss the scenios and implications. If you’re interested in getting involved, more information is here [pdf file].

Finally, here’s a video in which two of the principal researchers discuss the scenarios: