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Comment by kacesensitive | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the kind of quiet financial engineering that changes the game for average savers—without their input. Most people already don’t understand how their 401(k) works, and now we’re going to default them into opaque, illiquid private equity products?

Sure, PE firms want access to that $12T market, but let’s be real: this is about locking in long-term capital with limited transparency and even more fees. The risk/reward profile is completely different from stocks/bonds.

And it’s all being decided over a Zoom call between megafunds a week before Trump’s second inauguration. Not a great look. But unfortunately this is towards the bottom of the list of egregious shit that has happened in the last couple of months.

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It’s one of the long-game problems that will be a disaster a decade or more from now, and it’s the middle-income majority that will be left dealing with the problem.

But will it be the younger millennials, gen-Z, and younger generations cleaning up the mess? Or will it be Gen-X and older millennials out in the streets and homeless? Or something else?

The young generation asked how they were handed a bag of problems. This is their moment to help decide how to address the problems of tomorrow, because it’s a battle to do so and policy changes and consequences are by design invisible to the typical worker.

It's sad to me that we pin so many expectations on the following generations when they're just starting their journey as adults. We're just kicking the can down the road, and they're arguably less equipped (in resourcing and current influence) to fix these problems than the generations before them.

You are hitting a real point here. Elders are supposed to create an environment for the future generations to thrive.

Here we are with elders (corporations and politicians really) creating many opportunities for themselves to suck the life out of younger people.

They’ll need to make do. As a gen-x, I got to live through the golden age of Pax Americana, led by the WW2 generation. Now we’re stuck with the loser boomers, and our kids will be facing the decline from the American century to the Asian.

We collectively fucked around and exported our assets and the our smarts. Now we find out.

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