At the On Wall Street Roundtable held recently in Lower Manhattan, the experts weighed in on the most significant retirement issues for advisors and their clients in an unsettled market and an equally unstable economy. They discussed issues including the harsh realities facing baby boomers, the financial needs of Gen X and Gen Y with their longer lead-in time to retirement, and the reason that distribution is still so hard after all these years. What matters most-lifestyle in retirement or meaningful community involvement? What's the measurement of a need versus a want? And is it really cool to be boring these days? (At least one panelist hopes so.)

The industry participants who offered up a wealth of insights this year were JIM McCARTHY, managing director of Client Advisor and Retirement Services at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney; KEVIN RUTH, managing director at UBS, responsible for retirement income and fund services; ANDY SIEG, managing director and head of Retirement and Philanthropic Services for Bank of America Merrill Lynch; KAREN WIMBISH, director of Retail Retirement for Wells Fargo; and MICHAEL WOODS, chief executive officer, U.S. head of distribution for DWS Investments, part of Deutsche Bank. Below are excerpts of our conversation.

LEE CONRAD/OWS: There has been so much written about retirement. What's the one story that you think has not gotten enough attention?

KEVIN RUTH: As an industry, we're still focused on the accumulation phase of retirement. When we speak about traditional investing, we're still talking about rates of return, risk profiles and growth. And that's especially been highlighted more with this recent crisis. But there's not enough press on distribution planning and managing wealth around distribution planning.

JIM McCARTHY: The other thing I think is under-discussed is the intersection between behavioral economics and real-world savings behavior. The little bit of talk about behavioral economics is more in the 401(k) universe about how to get people to have a higher deferral rate or to allocate a little bit better.

But if you diligently refine your expectations, you can be happy with a retirement that's somewhat lower than your original plan. I don't think the picture is as bleak for as many people as some talk about and behavioral economics is going to be a way that people come to that realization.

KAREN WIMBISH: I would echo both of those comments, particularly about income distribution in retirement. For the people who tell us they want to have a paycheck every month in retirement just like before, I don't think we have very good, concrete answers for that. Also, I would say that with the first baby boomers retiring next year, the story is still unwritten as to how they're really going to do in retirement. There is this huge cultural shift, from current retirees who are children of The Depression and savers who aren't big on consumption, to this huge group now getting ready to retire-or hope they'll be able to retire.

MICHAEL WOODS: One thing that has not been shown enough is the significant backward momentum that so many people have seen in their retirement savings over the past few years. What are they going to do to get back to where they expected to be? It's likely going to take more than a decade of additional time in the workplace and I don't think we're discussing it enough. A study from Hewitt said you need about 15.7 to 16 times your last year of income to maintain your quality of life in retirement. And Hewitt thinks that roughly 18% of American workers right now are ready for that number, 18%, that's it. We-as an industry-have to talk more about the accumulation side now because while the income side is important later, people need more money than they think to retire.

ANDY SIEG: We share a lot of perspectives here, but just to be provocative, I would add the idea that retirement in traditional terms may no longer exist. If we envision the retirement of our parents' generation, what the baby boomers are going to experience will be an entirely different, far more active period of their later lives. They will be working more. They'll be engaged in causes. They'll be traveling more. In many ways, our parents' generation's retirement, which involved a lot of time on the beach or the golf course, just frankly isn't appealing to many of the baby boomers as they think about this much-longer time period. And this move of older workers back into companies and into the workforce could in some ways be as dramatic as women entering the workforce in the 1950s and 60s in terms of driving cultural change.