The stock market isn’t the economy, at least as most Americans experience it, though it is the same metric that Trump and his followers used to show how “strong” the economy was during his term.
If I had a nickel for every time some Trump apologist said “sure, Trump’s a jerk, but how’s your 401(k)?” during 2017-2021, I’d have… a lot of nickels.
“sure, Trump’s a jerk, but how’s your 401(k)?”
Total shit like always. 401ks are poor substitutes for pensions or ya know social security that’s actually worth something, since I don’t think it will exist when I can retire.
401Ks, in general, are a terrible substitute for pensions and social security. The GOP wanted to push Americans’ retirement funds into the stock market, and they did that with 401Ks.
I ran some basic analysis a few weeks ago, and even with the corporate matching on 401Ks, due to the poor fund investment options available in most 401Ks, they underperformed index funds over a 30 year period.
Yes, that means many people who contributed to their 401K at full amount, even with matching, have less money than someone who just invested in SPY or VOO over the same period.
Financial vehicles for retirement should be relatively low risk, with that risk becoming even lower as you reach retirement age. Investing in a single stock, no matter what it is, is a high risk. Sure, you can look into the past and say “if you’d just invested in Stock X,” but that’s with the benefit of hindsight.
The only way you should be managing your 401K is into an index fund with low fees. That’s it. Everything else is gambling.
Yup. If your 401k is consistently losing money, then you have it in the wrong investments. You should be seeing an average return of ~7%.
confused by your comment because my 401k contributions go directly towards index funds. are you talking specifically about target date funds, or something else?
It’s laughably obviously that this individual has zero experience with individual retirement accounts and is, in fact, making up this alleged analysis. There is no way they even have access to such data.
Target year funds will almost always underperform SPY, by design. They are broad market funds which taper into bonds over time. Either way, I have never seen a 401k which doesn’t have many, many index tracking options.
The index fund options in many 401Ks underperform - this is just across the average, not all 401ks. Some 401Ks have general stock market index funds, some only offer index funds in specific sectors or target metrics.
The analysis I ran started with the question: ‘given the average 401k, compare returns including average match against general stock market index funds’.
My assumption going in was that 401Ks would return better results because of the employer match, but that’s not the case on average. The average investor would have significantly more money if they’d just invested in ‘market’ index funds, and it wasn’t even close.
That being said, 401Ks or general ETF funds are still risky and inferior when compared to pensions and social security.
Holy shit you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Most 401ks these days have very few restrictions on how they can be invested. And you can always roll them into an IRA with basically no restrictions. You can literally day trade options on margin in most IRAs.
Yeah, but now the upper and middle classes future are dependent on stonks go up. Who would have guessed that all it took to disrupt class solidarity between the lower and middle class was just a little gambling?
Also, there are all those management fees to be made…I’m surprised the 401K is even legal at this point. Imagine setting up a structure where huge amounts of guaranteed profits are given to an industry:
All told, the Center for American Progress estimates that a typical worker – earning the median income and paying the average 401(k) fees over their lifetime – will be assessed a total of $138,336 in fees. And the cost is much more severe for high-income workers, who, assuming a starting salary of $75,000 at age 25, are projected to pay an estimated $340,147 over their lifetimes, thanks to the fee structure of the average 401(k) plan.
Why would that surprise you? It’s the kind of policy Republicans absolutely love, and which most elected Democrats are perfectly willing to tolerate.
That’s on them for falling for the " money managers know what they are doing" scam.
I fell for it for 10 years. Now it’s direct stock ownsership and etf’s. The founder of Vanguard started his fund because he knew the scam.
Everyone thinks they have a young Warren Buffett running their investments when really it’s used car salesmen getting kickbacks for investing your money in bad funds. Obama made that illegal but if course Trump made it legal again.
Sounds like victim blaming to me. Scams should not be legal or tolerated, and most especially, nobody should be allowed to profit from running a scam.
Is Vegas a scam? You know the odds. Funds publish their returns and their charges. The commissions on bad investments should be illegal and once were.
Do Vegas casinos party money to promote the idea that gambling there is an investment?
Your analogy sucks. Everyone knows gambling is for entertainment.
This is no different from a pension though. Those were typically managed funds as well.
This depends greatly on circumstances. In many cases a 401k will be worth significantly more than the equivalent pension (in my father’s case, his pension buyout was worth double ten years later), and there’s no risk of bankruptcy rendering your 401k insolvent. Likewise, many jobs which would have never come with a pension have 401k matching these days.
The downside is obviously that it rides the stock market, but you can make the argument that this actually makes the collective global economy our pension. It’s gives more people a stake in that stability and growth, for better or worse.
In many cases betting at a casino has a higher ROI than any actual investment. Still doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to bet your life savings at a casino.
Betting on the S&P 500 is way less risky than betting at a casino, especially in the long-term. You are betting on the growth of the global economy, not betting on whether the casino wants to give you money.
Good thing people only put their money in the S&P 500.
If you want to criticize fund managers or lack of regulations for pushing people towards risky picks like individual stocks, then fine. That doesn’t mean that 401(k)s and 403(b)s are bad tools.
Either way, the “casino” argument falls flat because an informed person can control the risk they undergo.
True, but also the economy was plummeting for years. I can’t think of a year Joe Biden was president that we weren’t expecting a recession by the end of it. Right now we’re looking at improvement next year. That’s what Biden’s economy is. He played a bad hand really well and we’re consistently doing better than countries with right wing leadership have been since the pandemic.
It’s just the cycle. Dems get the economy healthy, then a republican comes in and trashes everything and leaves a mess for the next dem in office to fix.
The policy changes always take some time to fuck things up, so it usually happens after the republican gets ousted.
I mean, the housing market is fucked for the foreseeable future because the Trump administration kept interest rates ridiculously low, well after we had recovered from the 2008 crash.
This made a bubble from businesses and individuals borrowing as much “free money” as they could because it was easy to beat the interest, even from low performing investments. Obviously, a lot of this money ended up in the real estate market, inflating the shit out of it. Then the pandemic happened, and everyone was stuck at home, wanting to upgrade, and bam, crazy inflation.
So now we’re rather fucked. Prices aren’t coming down because people are locked into their stupidly low interest rates and can’t sell without taking a huge hit.
Big surprise that existing real estate owners saw their properties double as a direct result of economic policy, dictated by a real estate tycoon president.
The US since it’s inception has basically been an experiment in free real estate.
The active president doesn’t really have as much control over the economy as people think, Trump’s tariffs are still in place and wholly supported by Biden as well to the chagrin of the WTO. People’s perception of the economy absolutely changes with the active president, to the point that people will feel more financially secure the day after the president they support wins the election and isn’t even sworn in to office yet. The overarching neoliberal capitalist economy is consented to by both major parties and is “right” leaning if we’re talking pure economic political spectrum. Democrats just believe in more tax incentives and inclusion, Republicans are more ruthless. I guess the main point I’m making is the “Trump” or “Biden” economy isn’t real, what they effectively have are dials that fine tune secondary parameters of the economy.
World events out of their control or financial sector behaviors (like mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations) are the “real” drivers and the government under either party is generally reactive. Biden is basically doing “good” things under this system that don’t upset it but have small noticeable improvements. So while it’s good to point this out it’s also important to realize these aren’t unprecedented or majorly new things and likely won’t alter our default economic arrangement and social contract, which is still being degraded as the neoliberal capitalist system degrades.
Economists and everyone else ALWAYS keep crying about a recession.
What I love is how they ALL seem to have done SO much better during Trump. Like they got paid more at work, they got more in taxes, people on the streets just threw money at them, the sky rained money…
Funny, the “fuck your feelings” pro-Trump crowd seems to perceive the state of the economy based entirely on their feelings.
“sure, Trump’s a jerk, but how’s your 401(k)?”
Or as I like to paraphrase, “My morality is for sale”
It’s only a “depression” when the ownership class is affected.
Classic “screw the rules, I have money” mentality
Reality truly doesn’t matter anymore. They just want to scream whatever they want to.
Says the “businessman” who bankrupted his own casinos and achieved his company wealth through fraud.
ETA: that is a very unflattering photo, holy shit.
ETA?
Edited to add
Confusing acronym given it already means estimated time of arrival.
Acronyms can have more than one meaning.
TLC - tender loving care
TLC - the learning channel
TLC - T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli
For when you need some advice on whether to pursue large bodies of cascading water or the desirability of the sanitary clothing worn by workers involved in patient care.
And Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, a militant Basque seperatist group that dissolved in 2018.
Probably only a couple people who thought that was what he meant, though. Three at most.
No it means Elvis Tribute Artist
The stock market is not a 1:1 representation of the spending power of your dollar. The stock market is how well your overlords are doing, not you, the average american.
True, but Republicans constantly tout the stock market’s performance when they are in charge. Every tick upwards is declared to be thanks to them. Every dip is said to be because Democrats got in the way.
So a Democrat in charge of the White House and the stock market rising is a good refutation of their talking point. For “common man economy indications,” I’d instead point to things like the extremely low unemployment rate.
They like to claim the low unemployment is somehow a bad thing. If you dig into why, it’s basically because when employees are harder to replace, they’re harder to exploit, so working conditions and wages improve while shareholder profits slightly decrease, and they focus entirely on the latter.
please look into how the unemployment rate is a false indicator as well. Unemployment numbers only show those who are actively looking for work, not those that have given up on a broken system. The Unemployment rate does not represent the true number of unemployed in our country. And please stop assuming that because people state a fact that looks bad on your party, that they are automatically for the opposite party. I said nothing about republicans. Them using the stock market as an indicator is just as bad. The truth is that the government has lost touch with the american public. if you want a TRUE representation of how good the economy is doing, look at discretionary spending (disregarding things like tobacco, drugs, alcohol and porn. people always make room for their vices) in the regular joe. look at how far $100 will get you at a grocery store. look at the amount of kids that have school lunch ‘debt’, look at how your local food bank is doing. these are true indicators of how well the country is doing, not what a bunch of out-of-touch, octogenarians on capital hill think. not one those people, both left AND right, have the average american in heart when they do the things they do. They are solely concentrated on getting re-elected, and continuing the will of the oligarchs that line their pockets.
trump lies about everything but the stock market has ever-decreasing relevance to the average american because it reflects the value of property and the average american is being shut out of owning anything.
I said it during the Trump admin and I say it still. The stock market is not the economy and I don’t really care how much money the top 1% owning the majority of stocks are
makingskimming.I agree, but it’s still blatant lying from Trump because you know he doesn’t care about that other 99% and the economy beyond the stock market.
Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation. Every word.
Some people will read that and think you’re exaggerating. I know better.
By every metric they ridiculed Obama over, and praised Trump for (forget delayed-onset of policy effects from Obama), they suddenly ignore for Biden lmao.
Gas coming down, inflation rate down, stock markers up, unemployment good, et.
Republicans have no need for facts and truth, truthiness and alternative facts are all they need and Trump’s word is all of that wrapped up in a nice racist package.
Okay but it isn’t for normal people. Your made up numbers have nothing to do with the average person.
For the average person, there is less inequality (Gini coefficient has gone down), high employment, and historic wage increases. Not saying there aren’t still lots of problems, but the economy is hands down better under Biden.
I love it when liberals start screaming at you about how it is misinformation that Americans think the economy isn’t doing great because stock market number good or some other economic number good.
It’s like, have you fucking talked to any human beings living in the US lately? Are you out of your mind? Life in the US is brutally hard right now. We are in the middle of a massive class war and we are losing badly, but yes the class that actually owns the economy is doing great.
Conservatives/Trump are obviously shittier choices, it just is 0% surprising that people don’t feel that happy about the stock market doing well when they can’t afford rent and the idea of owning a home is a laughable pipe dream.
We are in the middle of a massive class war and we are losing badly
Dude, consider some of the positives …. I’m old enough to remember Reagan union bashing by firing air traffic controllers. Now we have unions showing more strength than I’ve seen in my life. They’ve been hit hard, over and over, decade after decade, but now are standing up again. This could be the big counterattack in that class war
Hey, I don’t want to be defeatist, I struggle with being defeatist.
In my effort to be positive I will say yes absolutely we are seeing organized labor making huge gains and that is wonderful.
We are still losing horribly at the moment though. I envy people who have genuine hope, but I just feel broken. I have never had a non-seasonal job that treated me with any sense of decency nor paid a living wage (enough to even consider not living with my parents). I graduated from college only a couple of years after the 2008 financial crash and my experience in life since then has just been increasingly half-heartedly trying to open locked doors while being harshly judged by older people who grew up with open doors everywhere (judgement which had material impacts on my opportunities). I realize that it is a failure of my life experience to feel hopeful but I can’t really help it. “fake it til you make it” about feeling hopeful or confident in yourself has never worked for me.
I guess I just share that to say just because the acceleration is in the direction of labor and worker organization doesn’t mean the momentum isn’t still fullswing towards a capitalist hellscape of austerity. Everyday I try to dismantle the framework of bullshit I learned growing up but at the end of the day it feels like scratching at rock walls with my finger nails. The momentum is horrifically incredible.
I can definitely see how that experience for that long would get anyone down. But I do believe you can do it. Just keep knocking on those doors and eventually one will open.
The thing about the advice to keep hopeful and confident is that interviewers will decide based on their impression of you - you have to “fake it till you make it” enough to motivate yourself to stay in the race and to get past that all important interview.
Even the crap jobs that get you down, try to look on them as opening that door. No you shouldn’t expect more out of a place treating you like crap, but if you do find that door opening to greener pastures, you want to look like a good worker well worth their investment. You can do it
Your subjective experience is one data point in a set of 300 million and the economy is not a description of each individual data set but about the circumstances that inform them
If you’re struggling, you would much rather struggle in a good economy than a bad one, because it means you have more options.
It’s all president drink bleach can do - constantly forecast doom and gloom to the people who aren’t happy without something to spend every waking moment worrying about.
It’s a drug to them worse than heroin.
constantly forecast doom and gloom to the people who aren’t happy
He even did this the whole time he was president because he had some minor setback or confrontation with reality. He’s all doom and gloom, and yet everyone gives him a free pass for it.
Donny Downer
His 2016 campaign spent all kinds of time saying how everything and everyone in America sucked, and yet these discerning folks and American media let him tout himself as “America first” when he not only non-stop shits on America and Americans, but spends more time talking about and thinking about his foreign properties and investments than anything America related.
And they eat it up because he says he’s gonna fix it. When in actuality he and his followers are the reason things are “bad”. It’s easier to blame Democrats for things the Democrats had nothing to do with than it is to actually do any work.
And then when Democrats set about fixing yet another Republican-led to fuck over the American people, the Republicans do whatever they can to sabotage it.
The R’s love America. Screwing it up for everyone anyway.
Considering he’s exploiting a biological mechanism we evolved to keep us alive, you’re not far off.
Tbf that’s what the 24h news cycle has been doing for over 20 years, so it’s nothing new.
He’s always saying some bullshit, can we move on?
I guess Trump is currently in the one in a depression phase.
That’s donnie, really tuned into the reality of things, at least as Faux “News” portrays them.
I seem to recall the stock market doing extremely well right up to 1929…
You remember that?! How old are you?
When nine hundred years old you are, not so slay you will look.
