Crisis Management by Liquidation: Trump’s 401k Order Turns Workers’ Futures into Collateral

How to Sell a Raid as Reform

The Financial Times article, “Donald Trump exposes US retirees to new world of risk with 401k order”, is presented as cool-headed financial reporting. It lays out Trump’s executive order opening 401k retirement plans to “alternative assets” like private equity and cryptocurrency, painting the move as a double-edged blade: a chance for higher returns and diversification on one side, potential hazards and higher fees on the other. Industry titans like BlackRock, Apollo, and Carlyle are cast as innovators championing access, while a handful of critics are allowed to murmur about risk before the story moves briskly along.

The authors write from deep inside the transatlantic finance-capital press corps, where proximity to the boardrooms of New York and the City of London defines the scope of the conversation. In this habitat, “serious” journalism means giving industry players the last word, never interrogating the historical record of similar deregulations, and smoothing the rough edges of corporate lobbying until it looks like public service. The FT itself is a house organ for global capital — chronicler, interpreter, and legitimizer of the very forces it purports to cover.

The article’s chorus of voices comes straight from the amplifiers of elite consensus: corporate executives at Apollo, Carlyle, BlackRock, and Blackstone; trade groups like the Defined Contribution Alternatives Association; friendly analysts and law firms; and the Trump White House’s own economic councils. Each delivers lines calibrated to frame the order as inevitable progress — “democratizing access,” “common sense,” “long overdue.” The dissent is polite, contained, and strategically placed to suggest balance without shifting the narrative’s center of gravity.

Six propaganda techniques hold the whole piece together. First, framing tricks — recoding a Wall Street windfall as a populist reform. Second, absence as a device — erasing the memory of past deregulations and their wreckage. Third, emotional triggers — the quiet fear of being left behind if your retirement stays in the “slow lane.” Fourth, technocratic inevitability — posing the move as the market’s natural evolution, not a political choice. Fifth, false balance — sprinkling in muted criticism to varnish neutrality while drowning it in pro-industry praise. And finally, legitimacy laundering — quoting C-suites and white-shoe law firms to make private interest sound like public wisdom.

Read straight, it’s the story of a policy shift weighed soberly by responsible adults. Read for what’s missing, it’s something else entirely: the careful construction of a narrative that makes a raid on the life savings of millions look like an act of modernization. That missing layer is what we dig for next.

The On-Ramp for Capital

The FT lays out the bones of the story: Trump has signed an executive order giving 401k plan managers permission to steer retirement savings into “alternative assets” — private equity, private credit, infrastructure funds, even crypto. Nearly $9 trillion sits in these accounts, most of it in plain-vanilla stocks and bonds. For decades, managers have avoided the more exotic corners of the market, not out of moral principle, but because the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) made them liable if high-fee, illiquid bets went south. Now the White House has issued a hall pass, complete with legal cover to keep lawsuits at bay. The order didn’t fall from the sky; it followed a full-court press from Apollo, BlackRock, Carlyle, Blackstone, and their lobbying arms, who have been pushing for this access for years. The industry wasted no time. BlackRock is building target-date funds that blend public and private holdings; Blackstone has partnered with Vanguard and Wellington; Empower is aligning with Apollo, Goldman Sachs, and Partners Group. The Department of Labor will issue guidance in six months, but the construction crews are already pouring concrete.

The article’s presentation is matter-of-fact, but the context it omits is the key to understanding why this is happening now. This is not the first deregulation of retirement savings, nor will it be the last. Since the early 1980s, U.S. retirement has been restructured from defined-benefit pensions to defined-contribution plans, where the payout depends entirely on market performance. This shift was not an accident of policy; it was a calculated reengineering of the social contract to put workers’ futures on the auction block. Once pensions were replaced by individual market accounts, Wall Street began its slow march through the regulatory walls, widening the definition of “prudent” investments with every step. First came mutual funds, then more complex blended products, then target-date funds that hid the volatility of their ingredients under a tidy label. Each new “innovation” brought higher fees, greater opacity, and more market risk pushed downward onto workers.

ERISA was supposed to be the backstop. It established fiduciary duties precisely to prevent retirement savings from being dumped into speculative schemes whose risks were difficult to measure and whose liquidity could evaporate overnight. But the history of finance since the 1980s has been a steady campaign to hollow out ERISA’s teeth — to reinterpret “fiduciary duty” so that it means maximizing short-term returns on paper rather than safeguarding long-term stability in practice (as subsequent DOL statements themselves make clear). Private equity’s record offers plenty of warnings: the post-2008 collapse of over-leveraged buyouts left pensions nursing heavy losses, and illiquid funds trapped investors who tried to redeem during downturns. Crypto’s history is even starker: within a decade, the industry has seen repeated multi-hundred-billion-dollar market wipeouts, fraud scandals, and bankruptcies. Yet in the policy lexicon of the current White House, these are not reasons for caution — they are simply “opportunities” waiting to be unlocked.

To understand why unlocking them is a priority, we have to zoom out. John Bellamy Foster’s analysis of financialization is the missing architecture behind this policy. Foster’s stagnation thesis makes the compulsion clear: in a mature capitalist economy, growth slows because productive investment yields diminishing returns. To keep profits up, the system turns inward, drawing more and more from existing pools of wealth rather than creating new ones. In the U.S., those pools are finite. Corporate balance sheets have been tapped; consumer credit is maxed out; public assets are being sold off. What remains is the slow-drip accumulation of household savings — and the largest, most stable reservoir is in retirement accounts. From the perspective of Wall Street, 401ks are the perfect “liquidity pool”: steady inflows, long horizons, low redemption risk, and participants with little power to influence allocation decisions.

This post-2008 hunt for “permanent capital” has a very specific origin. In the wake of the crisis, institutional investors pulled back from illiquid and risky strategies. The solution was to find new investors who could not easily withdraw capital during downturns. Defined-contribution plans fit perfectly, given lockups and redemption limits typical of private funds. The legal cover provided by Trump’s order removes the last major obstacle: the fear of fiduciary lawsuits. Now, if these funds underperform or collapse, the workers bear the loss, not the managers.

There is precedent for what happens next, though you won’t find it in the FT’s telling. Chile’s privatized pension system, imposed under Pinochet in the early 1980s, funneled worker contributions into private funds that charged high fees and delivered poor returns. Other countries following the model saw similar results: enrichment for fund managers, insecurity for retirees, and a transfer of systemic risk from the financial elite to the working class. The U.S. is now importing this experiment in reverse, applying it not to a peripheral economy under IMF supervision, but to its own population — a sign of just how far the logic of financialization has advanced.

This is the central contradiction the FT sidesteps. The short-term needs of capital — to keep asset prices inflated, to generate new fee income streams — directly undermine the long-term security of the very people whose money is being used. The marketing language is “choice” and “diversification,” but in practice it’s the oldest trick in the capitalist playbook: shift the risk downward, extract the gains upward, and let the losses disperse among the many. Foster’s point is worth remembering here: financialization is not about expanding the total wealth of society, it’s about re-dividing existing wealth in favor of those who already own the levers. In the case of the 401k order, the levers are now wired directly into the paychecks and futures of ninety million people. The on-ramp is open, and the toll will be collected later — when the bills come due in old age.

Crisis Management by Liquidation

Read against the grain, the order is not a tweak to portfolio theory; it is the confession of a system that has run out of road. The center of gravity is the crisis of imperialism—an economy that once floated on plunder now treading water in stagnation, war, and debt. When the spoils thin out and the engine coughs, the ruling class does not rethink its map; it strips the vehicle. The language is polished—modernization, choice, diversification—but the program is blunt: liquidate the social contract; mortgage the future to keep the present balance sheets smiling. That is why an instrument built to protect working people’s deferred wages is being rewired into a feed line for the very circuits that keep the crisis alive. The move is sold as empowerment precisely because it is expropriation; it must persuade while it dispossesses.

The operating system for this phase is what we name technofascism: not jackboots, but seamless integration. State authority writes the permissions, platform capital writes the code, and high finance writes the business logic. The effect is governance as software update—rolled out overnight, installed by default, impossible to uninstall without voiding the warranty on your own life. Consent is managed by dashboards and disclosures; pain is privatized as “market learning.” The public sphere is reduced to a terms-of-service box: click “I agree” to keep earning a wage; click “I agree” to keep a roof; click “I agree” to keep a future. When the state deputizes private power to harvest what was once protected, you are no longer a citizen with claims—you are a user with exposure.

The policy sits inside a broader strategic pivot we call imperialist recalibration. When the old instrument set—open conquest, cheap loot, easy credit—stops producing, the empire doesn’t retire; it retools. It pulls risk off elite ledgers and pushes it down the social pyramid. It converts public guarantees into private revenue streams and calls that “innovation.” It replaces the promise of shared prosperity with the promise of optionality: you can choose the manner of your precarity from a curated shelf of products. The recalibration is not temporary triage; it is the new business model of decline. The order tells us that maintaining elite reproduction no longer depends on expanding production; it depends on expanding claims over what workers have already earned.

This is why the rhetoric must glow. The point of calling expropriation “access” is not merely to mislead; it is to train the imagination to confuse enclosure with freedom. If participation in risk is framed as citizenship, then refusal can be stigmatized as ignorance. You are invited to feel sophisticated for assuming exposures you did not design and cannot hedge. The theater works best when the audience repeats the lines: “I’m diversifying,” “I’m getting in early,” “I’m thinking long term.” But in the wings, the roles never change. The manager collects fees whether the play bombs or not. The underwriter wins whether the house fills or empties. The only bet that truly settles is the one placed on your future paychecks.

To name the method without anesthesia, we call it financial piracy—plunder with paperwork, seizure by prospectus. It is daytime theft legal enough to be respectable and complex enough to be misunderstood. The trick is elegant: take a protected commons of wages deferred and carve from it a new stream of rents. Shred the buffer that once separated livelihood from speculation, then invoice the lifeboat as a premium service. None of this requires breaking a single statute once the statutes are rewritten to serve exactly this end. To the extent there is violence, it is slow: numbers compounding in quarterly reports, lifespans contracting in kitchen-table arithmetic. The cut does not feel like a blade; it feels like a shrug—“markets go up and down.”

The arena in which this can be done at scale is the one we name the domestic extraction zone. In earlier cycles, the metropole exported austerity while importing tribute; now, austerity is franchised at home. The techniques perfected abroad—asset sales disguised as reform, risk socialized and gains privatized—are deployed against the very population that financed empire’s long summer. The border between “outside” and “inside” blurs, not because solidarity has triumphed, but because capital is hungry. City budgets become securitization fodder. Public services are remade as fee platforms. Retirement itself is reimagined as a market where the product is your uncertainty. The zone has no checkpoint; it is a policy condition. You live in it when the only form of safety on offer is a portfolio you cannot audit and a promise you cannot enforce.

Crucially, none of this is a conspiracy in the shadowy sense. It is a class reflex. When profit rates sag, the owning class does not hold a symposium on justice; it looks for collateral. The order is collateralization in plain sight: a pledge of your later years to backstop someone else’s present. The crisis explains the tempo; the integration of state and capital explains the ease; the language explains why so many will clap while being marched to the cashier. We are meant to believe the gamble is ours because the winnings, if any, will be counted in our name. But the one rule never wavers: the house tallies first.

If the story ended here, it would be bleak. But the truth is that naming the architecture already begins to loosen its hold. When we identify technofascism not as spectacle but as workflow, we can jam the workflow. When we see imperialist recalibration not as fate but as a design choice, we can choose differently. When we expose financial piracy behind its permits, we can revoke them. And when we refuse to live as a domestic extraction zone, we can rebuild the old guardrails as collective power rather than private contracts. The point of reframing is not to perfect critique; it is to reopen strategy. The order teaches us the stakes: an empire will sell the bones to buy time. The counter-lesson is ours to write: a people can repossess the future by refusing to be the collateral.

From Exposure to Action

The executive order is a live policy, not a historical footnote. It is already shaping the menu of retirement investments, the behavior of asset managers, and the flow of household savings into markets designed to serve the few. Naming the architecture is necessary, but insufficient. The question for those in the imperial core who reject being treated as a revenue stream is: what can be done now to disrupt this trajectory? Solidarity with the global majority is not abstract here — the very techniques being deployed against U.S. workers were refined over decades of neoliberal warfare against the Global South. Linking our struggles is not charity; it is self-defense.

We begin by standing with the organized resistance wherever it exists. Movements like Chile’s No+AFP campaign against privatized pensions offer both a warning and a blueprint. Their fight to dismantle a system that enriched fund managers while impoverishing retirees is the same fight now on our doorstep. Publicly aligning with such campaigns exposes the order as part of a transnational pattern, not a domestic “reform,” and creates channels for mutual support.

There are concrete lines of engagement. First, target the companies positioned to profit most directly from the order. Launch pressure campaigns against major 401k administrators — Fidelity, Vanguard, Empower — demanding they refuse to load plans with private equity and crypto products. Force them to explain to workers why these products deserve space in retirement menus. Second, build mutual aid structures to cushion those already exposed. Local unions, cooperatives, and community organizations can pool resources into solidarity funds aimed at supporting retirees or near-retirees facing losses, bridging the gap between policy critique and material support.

Third, open the black box. Create a publicly accessible “Retirement Risk Tracker” that documents the fees, leverage, historical performance, and transparency of every alternative asset marketed to 401k plans. Crowdsource the data. Make it impossible for these products to hide behind jargon and glossy brochures. By mapping the risks, we arm workers with the knowledge to refuse bad options and to pressure plan sponsors to exclude them. Fourth, treat political education as infrastructure. Host teach-ins with labor councils, retiree associations, and civic groups on the history of pension privatization, the mechanics of financialization, and the specific stakes of the current order. Pair the global case studies — Chile, Argentina, Eastern Europe — with the U.S. trajectory to drive home the shared logic.

These strategies are not ends in themselves. The goal is to build a base of workers and communities who recognize that their struggle over retirement security is inseparable from the fight against the broader machinery of expropriation. It is to turn passive account holders into active political agents who see their deferred wages as a battleground, not a gift. The order is a test balloon for deeper privatizations to come. If it meets no organized resistance, the same playbook will be applied to public healthcare, education funding, and any remaining social insurance. If it is met with coordinated action, it can become the point where workers in the core break from the cycle of accepting austerity as inevitability.

To move from exposure to action is to refuse the role of collateral. It is to look at the fine print of this order and answer not with resignation, but with disruption — disruption of the companies that designed it, of the political machinery that passed it, and of the narrative that says our futures must be wagered to keep their system afloat. That disruption begins wherever we are, with whatever we can build together, aimed always at the same horizon: repossessing the future they’ve already written off as theirs to sell.