This blog was created based on our podcast with Patrick Donohoe and Barry Dyke. Click here to listen to it now! http://thewealthstandard.com/barry-dyke-and-a-risk-free-retirement-episode-138/
Learn from the Corruptness of Wall Street
America is in a retirement crisis. The truth is, in 1983 if you worked for a large employer, 83% of the population had defined benefit or guaranteed income stream. Today, that has gone down to 17% of the population and, really, out of that 17%, the lion’s share of the people who do have defined benefits around pension plans, only seven percent of the population now has a true pension plan. There is a retirement crisis and everything coming from Wall Street now is very, very unstable.
The shift from defined benefit to more of the 401k structured retirement is a shift in risk, and also control. In The Highway to Serfdom, the part two of The Pirates of Manhattan, Barry Dyke went into a lot of detail associated with that cycle of Wall Street academia and Washington, D. C. They’re colluding one another and, essentially, benefitting massive corporations and shareholders, and then taking all of that money and turning it around and putting it into insurance.
That’s the hypocrisy of it all. What we discovered is that this whole system of ours is built upon the use of other people’s money. There was another book about this, Other People’s Money [and How the Bankers Use It], written by Justice [Louis D.] Brandis, who became a justice of the Supreme Court. It’s essentially about this and what’s going on today. So you should know this: Your 401k’s people are really controlled by Wall Street.
This has really been a demographic shift. In the old days, you didn’t see this kinda crap going on because they didn’t have access. In other words, Wall Street didn’t call individual investors one-on-one and push stocks. What has happened–and this is really kinda the defining moment–is that there has been a shift in the defining contribution model, where Wall Street only has to call on several mutual fund companies, instead of thousands or hundreds of thousands of individual investors. So, the control has all shifted to regular people and corporations.
We didn’t realize that people didn’t really understand that the assets were controlled by Wall Street. And government isn’t going to help because the government’s in bed with these guys at Wall Street. The government controls this stuff.
I remember watching the documentary, Chasing Madoff where it was an analyst from Boston who, basically, saw the fund of Madoff and did all the research on how what he was claiming was different than reality. He had been crying to the SEC for ten years and they would not hear him at all until Madoff actually turned himself in.
So what are we to learn from the corruptness of Wall Street, and the information contained in these books? Well, in a nutshell, it’s to simply assist ourselves, get out of debt, and stay away from Wall Street. Everyone has some God-given talent, and they should invest in themselves first. The whole thing is really simple and intuitive. If you want to get good at anything, you have to work at it for a long period of time. However, we’ve been taught or were brainwashed that if we just give them our money–our hard-earned money–they’ll turn it into gold! It’s really financial alchemy, if you will. People need to wake up to that.
Now, I am a financial advisor. I do believe in equity but the whole thing is so overblown. The word “security” is misleading because there’s nothing secure about them at all!
Nothing! This really hits home on target date funds. Even Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, has real concern with target date funds. I originally did a research project for a major executive public corporation and part of their disclosure had these target date funds from Vanguard. None of them–not one major Vanguard target date fund–has made a dime since inception. Not one! But they’re the default investment for American savings. So you put money into a retirement date fund, you lose money. That’s not very smart, is it?
The primary relationship between the public and Wall Street is trust. That boggles my mind because of the signs of the abuse of that trust. There is a dozen, two dozen documentaries, there are hundreds of books written on it. It’s everywhere!
So again, the best thing you can do is STAY AWAY FROM WALL STREET. Get out of debt and find more secure ways of investing. You can find all sorts of courses online. One such course is Paradigm Life’s Infinite 101 course, which you can register to for FREE here.
