Setting Us Up As Patsy

I retired in 2007, after taking advantage of my company's favorable IRAs and 401(k)s and building up a sizeable nest egg. The company had done away with its traditional retirement plan and moved entirely to IRAs and 401(k)s. At the time, the conventional wisdom was to put your retirement savings into interest-bearing investments. So I did, and I went for what I thought was the very best: AAA-rated, AIG-guaranteed Lehman Brothers bonds. The gold standard.

Then came 2008. In one week, I lost two-thirds of my life's savings. Now guess what? Trump wants to make it even riskier!

Wall Street Wants to Change the Rules for Your 401(k). It Could Put Your Retirement at Risk.

Financial firms want a bigger piece of the $10 trillion in America’s 401(k) plans, and the Trump administration is planning a regulatory rollback to encourage  less-regulated — and often riskier — investments.

ProPublica

by Paul Kiel

July 8, 2026

Most Americans don’t look to their 401(k) plans for excitement or experimentation, instead relying on the promise that steady saving and sober planning will guarantee security in their golden years. But the Trump administration wants to transform the well-worn patterns of retirement investing. 

To do so, it is moving to weaken the main protection workers have over their retirement money. The man in charge of the regulatory rollback is an industry insider whose former clients are among the large companies likely to benefit from his plan.

Since taking office last year, President Donald Trump has loudly called for plans to include less-regulated — and often risky — investments like private equity and cryptocurrency. To achieve that goal, the administration is softening one of the strongest legal protections American workers have: the right to hold an employer accountable when retirement savings are mishandled. The change is designed to give employers cover if their workers’ 401(k)s are deflated by expensive, opaque or unproven investments.

“What they have done is lower the standard for everything,” said Ali Khawar, a former senior official at the Department of Labor, which is charged with enforcing the federal law that governs retirement savings.

Of course he wants to do it! The billionaires make money whether the markets go up or down! You pay a commission on the trades.

But that's not all. Trump is rigging it so you are buying “a pig in a poke!” You see, at the same time they want to make this change, the SEC is changing its reporting requirements. The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance writes,

>    What could change? Meaningful relief is on the table. The Proposed Amendments would increase two important thresholds: first, the overall threshold for the requirement to file Form PF would increase from $150 million to $1 billion in private fund assets under management, and, second, the threshold for filing as a “large hedge fund adviser” would increase from $1.5 billion to $10 billion in hedge fund assets under management. The Proposed Amendments would also, among other things, eliminate quarterly event reporting obligations for private equity fund advisers and streamline a number of other reporting requirements applicable to other filers.

[...]

>   Adviser-led Secondary Transactions, Continuation Vehicles, and Other Liquidity Solutions: With respect to adviser-led secondary transactions, the Release indicates that the SEC in particular recognizes the increasing use and growing importance of continuation vehicles and other liquidity vehicles in the market, noting specifically that these vehicles “maximiz[e] the value of a high performing asset or provid[e] existing investors liquidity while attracting new investors.” This development is critical for private equity sponsors, not just under Form PF but also because it signals a broader acceptance by the SEC that these structures are ordinary-course portfolio management tools and not necessarily indicators of market stress. The proposed changes suggest a more practical regulatory view of these structures, contrary to the approach taken by the prior SEC, which subjected them to enhanced regulatory attention under both Form PF and the now-vacated Private Fund Adviser Rules.

What this boils down to is less reporting. Instead of quarterly reporting, it will no longer be required in some circumstances. And if the funds own any other funds, they used to have to report them, but not anymore. ProPublica goes on to write;

Tim Hauser, a 34-year-veteran of EBSA who was the highest-ranking career staffer there before retiring last year, said such ideas undermine the heart of ERISA. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, EBSA was “dedicated to protecting plan participants,” he said, but that has changed under Aronowitz. The ability of courts and regulators to hold employers accountable for using bad judgment when choosing 401(k) investments is “fundamental to this whole system,” Hauser said. “They are proposing to deprioritize it at the same time that they are encouraging plans to invest in more complicated, opaque investments. It’s infuriating.”

The shift at EBSA has also been evident in court. Over the last year, the Labor Department has filed amicus briefs — friend-of-the-court filings that lay out legal arguments for judges — in several class-action lawsuits on the side of the defendant company. In the past, the Labor Department’s briefs had generally sided with the employees. These amicus briefs can be influential. Recently, the agency interceded on Home Depot’s behalf in a case pending before the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs then dropped it.

The New Times wrote;

Pressed by his Wall Street supporters, President Trump is moving to liberalize the types of investments Americans can make with their individual retirement accounts. Instead of betting their retirement savings on plain vanilla stocks and bonds, account holders would be allowed to move their funds into sexy sectors like private equity, private credit and cryptocurrency — no matter their complexity, risk and illiquidity.

Supporters of the switch make the case that individuals should have the same access to private assets with potentially higher returns as institutions and the wealthy. But this argument rests on the false premise that most Americans are equipped to evaluate these complex, opaque investments. They are not. And expanding access to them risks doing more harm than good.

What does it mean to us? It means that the billionaires are going to make even more money from us peons. They are playing us for shill, patsy, and rubes and stacking the deck against us.