Re-Balancing Mom’s Retirement. Chinese investments?

So, mom finally did set up online access to her retirement account and let me see the disaster her employer made for her.

For starters, they never submitted her beneficiary paperwork that she turned in after her divorce 8 years ago, so if anything had happened to her, her ex-husband would have inherited all of the money.

So we fixed that.

Then I took a look at the allocations that they made.

They threw a woman in her mid 60s in a fund that would have been more appropriate (risk) for a 30 year old.

The people setting these funds up are stupid. Just absolutely stupid.

She’s old enough that she’s making catch up contributions, and they had her in stocks including emerging markets (in South America, Asia, CHINA!!!), when none of those places are reliable investment opportunities.

You might make money in China, on paper, now try to get it out.

I read about a man who made $4.5 billion in Chinese investments and then tried to get it out of the country and bring it to the US, and the only thing the bank gave him were excuses about why he couldn’t have it. Questions about why he wanted it. He’s got $4.5 billion sitting there and the Chinese are such unreliable “investment partners” that they wouldn’t let him have it.

Now, with mom’s previous allocation, only about 3% was emerging markets.

But why in God’s name would you want any money in a country like China that says you can’t have it when you ask for it?

If you want a lot of money sitting there taunting you that you can’t actually have, you would have loved Celsius and FTX, which were just great. Just as good as Tencent.

So I blew that away and set up a nice re-balanced portfolio with 80% investment grade bonds and 20% stocks, mostly large cap US and developed countries with open markets and solid regulatory frameworks.

Growth prospects in the US and other developed countries are limited, but there’s some good dividend stocks to hold that aren’t going anywhere soon and where you can actually sell them and have money. There’s tight regulations around Bond funds here too. Do you really want to own Chinese bonds?

I don’t know how many lumps people who invest in China are going to have to take before they realize what’s going on over there.

China’s economy is mismanaged as Hell and if there’s going to be losses, their philosophy is that foreign investors will get fucked before their own, and if there’s a Chinese bank crisis (and there is), then their own people not only don’t get access to their funds through their version of the FDIC, but if they complain about losing ALL of their money in a failed Chinese bank, they get kidnapped by men in a van who show up so that they can be shown what comes next if they go to Beijing to complain to the authorities.

What kind of investment partner has this going on?

Who wants this crap in their retirement account?

Anyway, so this is the mess I’ve been tasked with sorting out, and I disposed of the unreliable investment allocations.

I’m glad I don’t live in China. For so many reasons. I mean, like not having the police show up if I book airline tickets out and ask why I’m traveling because they’re scared that I’ll claim asylum when I get there is good. That’s a good place to start.

You put money in a bank and you don’t know what will happen if the bank goes under.

People living in the West might talk of cash shortages at ATMs or pressure to use the banking system or weird laws where they ask why you want lots of money, but we’re a long way from having no FDIC and kidnappers who show up in a van for people who complain about it.

In many ways, China isn’t just an authoritarian dictatorship, their banking system is really underdeveloped. They claim there’s deposit insurance but then what actually happens during a bank run is more like the US in the 1920s.

It would just really scare me to have any exposure to their markets.

As part of the things you couldn’t say or risk being kicked off “Social Media” a couple years ago, the Chinese Police Stations in the US are finally being reported in the Mainstream Media. They have to now because the government, which knew they were there and didn’t stop them until now, is arresting Chinese Secret Police agents.

When I quoted CNN and NPR about the Chinese Police Stations, “stux” cited that post as one of the reasons I was thrown off of mstdn dot social.

The left is still out there censoring this stuff even though it is now UNDENIABLE PROVEN FACT.

In addition to the two arrests in New York, there’s 28 Chinese Secret Police officials that are connected to that which are on the FBI’s wanted list.

You can’t criticize China. You can’t criticize China. You can’t criticize China.

No matter what crimes they are committing against your country, if you say it, you will have your Social Media accounts terminated.

And now it’s proven. They run illegal Secret Police Stations in the US which are harassing and threatening Americans. Biden was letting it go on, he was censoring the news, until he had to respond to breaches in our airspace with “something”.

So then the government, which knew about the Secret Police Stations all along, took the media blacklist off and made some arrests. That’s nice.

Cheaper than shooting down a $30,000 balloon with scrambling a fighter jet ($100,000) and shooting a missile at it ($400,000).

It’s not that Trump was any better. Apparently there were five of these damned things and all he did was let it happen and not talk about it.

The US government is looking pretty impotent under our most recent two Presidents, which are letting the enemy honk our nose and pull our underwear up over our head.

It really is demoralizing.

The MSM is both admitting all this stuff they were censoring before, and yet when you quote them, you still get called “a hoax” and thrown off “Social Media”, so someone isn’t getting the latest memos, apparently.

De-Dollarization?

I doubt it. Anyone who goes along with this will find out quickly that the Chinese are even more duplicitous than the American government.

If you “standardize” on the Yuan, you will hold a currency that is pegged to the Dollar anyway, and it will be issued by a bunch of double-dealing backstabbers who run a regime of terror against their own citizens.

You may even find that your investments can’t actually be sold for money later.

What the Hell are you supposed to do with Chinese Funny Money that can’t even leave the country, I wonder.

Maybe the ones that go along with it will be these unstable hyperinflationary BRICS countries that have been taken over by corrupt Socialists. It’s very easy for the Chinese to turn these places into a debt colony.

Although a lot of these “Belt and Road Initiative loans” have been denominated in US Dollars. So the Chinese may be slowing their purchase of Treasuries, but they still have to buy USD while they put their own citizens on the hook for expensive loans to banana republics.

Already, these loans are falling apart and the Chinese banks are just “adjusting the terms” to try to claim that it’s not a loss.

The United States tried to go down the same road a long time ago and trying to run an empire gets expensive and unravels eventually anyway.

Even if you can get your money out of China, why help them build their economy?

It’s bad enough that we have all these Chinese imports while so many Americans are out of work. That’s just starting to change, but in the mean time the best way to deal with China is to yank your retirement funds out of their companies and defund them.

If people take an active interest in their portfolios and gang up on China, we can do something about them even while our own government is coddling them.