President Trump's proposal for retirement accounts, announced earlier this week, has some real policy chops underneath it.

Why it matters: While still vague, the plan arrives at a moment when policy wonks are rethinking how the U.S. handles retirement, one of the most feared chapters in a working person's life.

Zoom in: The basic idea is to enroll lower-income Americans, who don't have 401(k)s, into similar kinds of plans. They would be "portable" — so you hold on to one — no matter where you work or if you work at all.

How it works: Trump can do some of this without legislation.

• Existing law passed under former President Biden already allows for the creation of new retirement accounts and authorizes matching funds for very low paid workers, those earning $20,500 or less per year.
• But Trump needs Congress to pass legislation for things like auto-enrollment or including more workers.

Friction point: In the State of the Union this week, Trump emphasized that retirement accounts were not a plan to cut other benefits: "We will always protect Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid."

• But there is a concern that these accounts would make it harder for lower-income workers to access necessary Medicaid long-term care supports after they retire. They may have too much in assets to qualify, yet not enough to obviate the need for help.
• "The problem facing poor seniors isn't that they didn't save enough for retirement," Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a former Social Security official, wrote this week. "It's that they've been poor all their lives."

By the numbers: The vast majority of high and middle earners have access to employer-based retirement accounts, compared with fewer than 20% of the bottom earners, according to an analysis by the Economic Innovation Group.

• Social Security, which is beloved by Americans and serves as an anti-poverty measure, also has an inequality problem.
• It is similarly regressive, with just 7% of benefits going to the poorest 20%. The richest receive 29%, as two retirement experts noted recently.

The big picture: There's a growing push from conservatives and some employers to make benefits, like sick days, "portable."

• It allows companies to offer something to a rising class of gig workers without going through the expense of paying for the kinds of benefits offered to full-time workers.

The bottom line: Politicians are usually loath to monkey with retirement, but something's in the air.

The pay gap between high-earning millennial and Gen Z men and women is shrinking compared with earlier generations. That's the good news.

Why it matters: Women are doing it by working longer hours and staying in the workforce, rather than taking timeouts for child care, finds a new working paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The bad news? Women MBAs earn less than their male peers as soon as they enter the workforce, and the researchers can't definitively say why.

By the numbers: Women with children who earned an MBA in 2006 or after were 60% less likely to leave the workforce than older women were, per the research released earlier this month from three scholars at the University of California, Berkeley.

• 13 years out of school, the older generation of women, on average, earned less than $300,000 a year. Men earned over $400,000. (If you take stock options and other equity grants into account, the gap gets even wider.)
• For the younger folks, at the 13-year point, the difference is just $34,000.

Where it stands: The researchers surveyed graduates of an unnamed public business school over 30 years, splitting them into pre-2006 and post-2006 groups.

• Not only were the younger women working more, but the paper also found the men were working slightly less.

The intrigue: The researchers controlled for all manner of things to explain the pay difference. They looked at what industries women and men choose, grades and test scores, child care availability and hours worked. Still, that gender gap remained at the start.

• "I would just call it gender bias," says Noor Sethi, a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, who did the research with Ann Harrison, the former dean of the Berkeley Haas School of Business, and Laura Kray, a professor who studies gender in the workplace.
• Though she concedes there may be some measure they overlooked, she still says, "The only reason women are being paid less, beyond some threshold, is because they are women."

On Sunday night, HBO will air the season four finale of "Industry."

Why it matters: It's a finance show that you can watch without knowing anything about finance, or while knowing everything about it.

• It's kind of like how doctors relish the medical jargon on the HBO hospital drama "The Pitt," while viewers who don't know what "tachy" means are simply watching it for the stories.

Zoom in: "Industry" follows a class of first-year analysts at a fictional Goldman Sachs-like investment bank in London called Pierpoint.

• The bank was gobbled up by a cagey sovereign wealth fund in season 3, but still follows the young analysts as they advance, and corrode and implode.

Catch up quick: The show premiered in the fall of 2020, and came out of the gate with a #MeToo storyline. Another season skewered finance's newfound love for ESG.

• This season brought more storylines ripped from the business pages, plus the usual mix of sex, cocaine and emotional baggage.

What they're saying: "There's only so much I'm going to understand about this," Myha'la, who plays short seller Harper Stern, said recently about the finance jargon during an interview at the 92nd Street Y in New York.

• She appeared with costar Ken Leung, who plays her mentor, father-figure and frenemy Eric Tao on the show.
• "I honestly gave up after season one," she said to laughter from the audience.

The intrigue: In the long tradition of HBO shows, most of the characters are terrible people. Yet Leung and Myha'la said they're approached frequently by finance workers who see them as role models.

• "They're so happy to tell me they're in finance, like, they want to be friends. I'm like, 'I play an awful person,'" Leung said.