57
Private equity wants a piece of your 401(k) — and hopes Trump can make it happen
(finance.yahoo.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
57 points (96.7% liked)
News
23929 readers
4336 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This isn't quite as bad as it sounds, but its still something I think should not happen.
Its not that private equity firms are going to reach into your 401k and take your money. What they want is for their private equity offerings to be offered right along side of the publicly traded stocks and mutual funds you have offered to you today.
They want you to have the choice to invest in their much riskier, less regulated, investments, but even if that choice happens, they can't force you to give them your money.
Because there are rules in place to protect investors in public companies. There are disclosure requirements that public companies have to do which adds transparency that private companies don't. Investments made in public stocks can be traded any time and you can exit an investment immediately if you're willing to take what the market will pay today. There is recourse public shareholders have against a company. They can sue. Not so for private investments which can lock up your money for whatever their rules say.
Besides all the reasons above, allowing private investment with 401k money is like letting people buy Bitcoin with their retirement savings. It a huge huge gamble, and that isn't what retirement savings is for. If you want to spend your non-retirement money on risky bets like private equity, Bitcoin, or "everything on red" in Vegas, that's what your non-retirement money is for.
Also, no individual investor is saying what this guy says. Folks that have enough money to invest in private equity are doing so outside of the their 401k.
Perfect example: you hear about Elon Musk getting sued by Tesla investors for his actions in the company. You never hear that about SpaceX, Boring Company, Neurolink, etc. Why? Of his companies only Tesla is publicly traded. All the others they aren't required to give any power to their stock holders.
Yeah I was terrified of the headline at first, but after reading the article came to the same basic conclusion as you.
At first I thought they were going to find a way to trade our 401(k)s without our consent like the mortgage-backed securities from pre-2008.