Might as well liquidate my 401k and take it to Atlantic City myself.
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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They're just going to take it all. We'll all be penniless in our old age.
What would the mechanism for this be?
'we can no longer fund social security after the rugpull crisis of 2027'
Its hilarious that this is realistically possible to happen.
Social security is different from retirement savings accounts. If the government starts confiscating privately held 401k accounts en masse for some reason there's probably bigger things to worry about, like iodine pills and canned beans
damn you're right, i crossed my wires there for one moment. but, like, doesn't that just mean the government doesn't have to do anything? the industry will be deregulated into the crypto bubble and the 401k system will be one tether audit away from replaying the 2008 housing crisis.
If 401k accounts consistently 2008 on people, no one will bother putting money into them and the system will collapse. Given that's literally a multi-trillion dollar industry, I'd like to cope and believe that the finance ghouls in charge are bright enough to not kill their golden goose by going all-in on $420KEK or whatever.
well the housing market is worth what, 100 trillion?
I'd like to cope and believe that the finance ghouls in charge are bright enough to not kill their golden goose by going all-in on $420KEK or whatever.
i'm afraid you've just lathed it
The difference is that subprime mortgages were being repackaged as safe investments and then used as fodder in retirement accounts. I severely doubt anyone's going to try something similar with crypto (again, coping that Wall Street is at least smart enough not to shit in their own food here, this comment will age poorly, etc etc)
That's the Greenspan Tragedy isn't it? Rationally and taken as a whole the finance, banking and pensions system wouldn't even think of doing this. But individually, Golden Parachutes can take managers very far indeed.
That said, there's no real reason to doom over this sort of ultimate financial fuckery. It's like trying to doomsday prep for thermonuclear war. Ya ain't surviving that.
I severely doubt anyone's going to try something similar with crypto
I have no doubt it will be tried. It may exist already, there are publicly tradable corporations that have large crypto holdings, basically copying MicroStrategy's strategy, and turning themselves into de-facto crypto ETFs.
what do you mean? as soon as 401ks go into crypto there are gonna be some massive rug pulls and that will be the end of that? i dunno.. crypto is sketchy as fuck
This relies on people actually going out and buying ruinous amounts of crypto in their 401ks, which I don't see happening en masse. Most people just set and forget on a single target date fund, probably the Qualified Default Investment Alternative for their plan. Even if the Department of Labor were to do away with the current regulations on QDIA diversification and option type to get people into crypto by default, we'd also need to see plan administrators who even want to do that, and I don't think we're going to see that from the likes of Fidelity and Vanguard.
This is not about individuals gaining the ability to use their pre-tax 401k dollars to buy crypto, it's specifically giving fund managers the permission they've actually already had for years, to expose their funds to high-volatility investment vehicles. Crypto, gold, silver, private equity investing into leveraged buyouts of companies to rip the copper out of the walls, etc.
Fidelity, Vanguard, et al. are exactly who asked for this and have already been doing this for years.
If they've already functionally had permission, what's the meaningful change here?
I also find myself skeptical that the barrier to high volatility investments being promoted in 401ks is that they didn't have the right stuff to push. There's been nothing functionally stopping fund administrators from offering gold ETFs for the two decades they've been available, for instance, it's just not terribly common.
Yes, this does in fact appear to be another useless retread EO, I think it's another example of the administration trying to replicate existing legislation in order to signal their support for a concept or will it into happening.
most people probably aren't really managing their 401ks, they just have part of their check put in and they don't think about it.. the fund managers in the other hand might be enticed by the higher managing fees to take a bit more risk
But can't that be said of any publicly traded investment with more risk and/or higher expense ratio? What's different here that's going to make this uniquely worse?
I think because stocks and bonds have pretty well defined risk categories. You can choose to go risky or you can choose to go safe.
Crypto is extremely volatile though and there isn't realy much in the way of less risky investing. Maybe it will be offered as high-risk only? Maybe it will be rolled into broader investment portfolios to hedge the risk? Maybe the whole damn country will just get rug-pulled? Who knows?
The fact that it's even being considered tells me there's something wrong going on here and it won't be good for the people as a whole which in my experience is a pretty safe bet.
leveraged funds buying basket of shitcoins, which goes to 0?
I mean yeah that's how to turn money into nothing, but how do we get to that point? 59% of Vanguard plan participants only hold a single target date fund according to page 6 of this 2025 report, and I really doubt much of the remaining 31% who use more plan offerings (making them less diversified, paradoxically) will end up investing a significant amount in crypto or crypto funds.
probably not directly, no, but it would be called like "etf of risky investment, 20% yoy perfomance". if they get even 5% of usa market, it would be more than neough for crypto
"even 5% of USA market" is doing a lot of work there. All the sector funds in the vanguard plans (what seems like the closest thing to compare crypto to, particularly the precious metals one) amount to 1% usage by participants, and every sector besides real estate has <0.5% usage.
Do they want to be hounded by a geriatric militia?
isnt this worthless fucking pig literally about to die of a heart condition? just hurry up already holy shit
im for real can we all hope really hard right now and try to will this to happen?
Fuck it, lathe me up fam, I’m going in 
Trump dances around the Epstein shit for a few more weeks, while setting things up for a nothing burger to actually be released. Just before it’s about to go out, his heart gives out. The US suffers a collective psychotic breakdown seen only in the schlockiest of 40k fiction. Balkanization quickly ensues
Isn't like Vance and his handlers aren't on the same boat.
not the point. nothing is gonna change obviously. im just sick of sharing a planet with these people
Emailing the HR department to switch plans so I can get exposure to $BOOBA
It's gonna suck when I have to explain to my grandma that her retirement fund is empty because all the apes are gone
This is gonna be for Gen Alpha what the repeal of Glass-Steagall was for Millennials
He is going to convince every fox news viewer to switch their entire 401k to trump coin
He's going to mandate it via an executive order, and the Supreme Court will uphold it.
"Trump not satisfied with current grift, needs to steal your retirement as well"
What is the Marxist stance on Gresham's Law? Bad money pushes out the good. Obviously not the same thing in terms of currency debasement, but it's like, your retirement index fund is now competing with the latest influencer-backed tulip mania hypecoin.
Cryptocurrencies are a form of bad money due to their speculative nature and lack of intrinsic value, and these assets will drive out more stable and productive forms of investment. Allowing retirement funds to invest in crypto exposes workers to short-term speculative investments, undermining the whole purpose of retirement funds.
Neither the dollar nor crypto have any commodity value, so I'm not sure Gresham's applies here. I'd tie this closer to fictitious capital and the scramble over the rate of profit declining.
I'd also hope that retirement funds were managed to chase consistent if low returns over aggressive growth assets with high volatility like crypto, but who knows what finance bros are smoking/snorting these days.
There should be 401k lotteries tbh. You buy bundles of tickets and put them in your 401k. Every 10 years they do a drawing. If you win, your 401k gets the money (no taxes).
Different corporations should run the lottery too, not the government.
Figure out how to make em tax deductable and you got urself a billion dollar business.
maybe workers will take more pro-active line about what exactly their retirement funds are being used for 🫠🫠🫠
Genuine question: why is crypto investment significantly more suspect than the casino that is the stock market?
It's not a "more suspect investment" as much as it is not an investment at all (in the marxist sense). Unless you are a crypto miner, you aren't a firm employing labor to produce crypto or process crypto transactions. You are literally the customer for crypto.
"Investing" in crypto currency by buying it is like "investing" in USD by buying USD paper bills, or "investing" in bread by buying bread at the supermarket. All in the hopes that you can then resell what you purchased at a higher price to someone else.
The only rational (in the mathematical sense) reason for anyone to buy currency of any type is to
- Keep liquidity for expected expenses in the future
- Purchase useful things that can only be purchased in that currency
However, a theoretically irrational action can be beneficial if you luck out. And the media tends to elevate the stories of irrational traders who lucked out, encouraging other people to behave irrationally.
While the public face of the stock market is all hype-driven speculation, there is a sizeable chunk of the market built on real industry and established companies with consistent low level growth and stability which retirement funds usually target in addition to treasury bonds. Crypto has none of that, it's all rampant speculation and hype.
there's even less regulation in crypto than in the stock market
Well, you know how the stock market pretends to be attached to like actual material things like capital and workers doing stuff and commerce happening? I mean in practice it's all just the vibes that the dumbest and most credulous rich dipshits alive feel when they look at a stock's name, but they've at least got the pretense of being related to material reality. It also has a giant cult of frantic, desperate belief around it to keep pumping those vibes up which is further backed up by immense amounts of state violence.
Crypto abandons even that in favor of just being mask off a pure speculative commodity built by no one with no use value or material form. It's 100% pure vibes all the time, serving the purpose of pumping and dumping monopoly money so the grifters who know it's a grift and are well positioned to take advantage of it can make out like bandits while everyone else gets fucked as the latest scheme collapses.
The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever.
There is no expectation that it should go up (or down) because it doesn't generate cash flows or have industrial use. The price only reflects sentiment.
Because it’s even way more made up. Stocks are at least tangentially related to the commodities the companies produce and their personnel.
Something like crypto derivatives (options) is bullshit on bullshit on bullshit, literally bs^3
I thinks its just one more layer of abstraction at this point, basically one more middlemen. I'm pretty sure that behind all the stuff the big cryptoexchanges say, they just end up putting the dollars in the stock market, if not just straight up funding rug and pull projects to achieve their interest rates. In other words, they are literally just investment funds.