Retirement Savings in the Dark

This article is part of the series, “Left Hook Economics: The Dollars & Sense Policy Forum.”

For most of the 20th century, there was a clear wall between working people’s pension funds and the riskier corners of financial markets. PERI’s Lenore Palladino discusses how Trump’s executive order titled “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors” is not about democratization, but instead is “an effort to redirect the $11 trillion dollars that ordinary Americans hold in 401(k)s into the least regulated, most opaque corner of American finance—at precisely the moment when the risks of investments that aren’t traded on public stock exchanges are becoming harder to ignore.”