Get Your Retirement Money Out of The System

Asset management firms are using woke ESG ideology to misallocate our savings

This week I liberated my superannuation money from the machine. For those in the northern hemisphere, this is more commonly known as a pension fund, and in places like the US and the UK it is optional. Here in the socialist republic of Australia and across the ditch in the Stalinist utopia of Aotearoa (that’s New Zealand for all you racists who don’t speak Te Reo (that’s Māori language for all you racists who don’t speak it)) it is compulsory.  

On the surface, mandatory retirement saving may seem like a good thing. I remember when New Zealand introduced its scheme ‘KiwiSaver’ and being perturbed at having to give up 4% of my salary each year. My father said to me “No, it’s actually a good thing – far too many people don’t save for their retirement.” He was of course right – many people are woefully underprepared for retirement, and this can lead to social ills which the taxpayer must foot the bill for. 

We should all save for our retirement – no question. 

But being forced to sock your money away by the government on pain of punitive action by the tax department is something else. 

Consider this: We are not taught in school or by society at large how to be good with money. There is no widespread public conversation about investing and planning for the future as there is about issues such as, say, LGBT rights, feminism, or racism. Ask you average 16-year-old about the importance of Rainbow Pride or BLM and you’ll likely get chapter and verse. Ask them what a P/E ratio is and you’ll draw a blank.  

Our institutions have a discernable interest in keeping the societies that nestle around their plinths financially illiterate. 

The answer instead? Asset management firms.  

The message is this: Don’t worry about all that investment guff – it’s too complicated for plebs like you to understand – instead, trust the experts.  

Geez, now where else have I recently heard that? 

Anyway, it gets better. Not only are they going to take all the hassle out of the equation for you, but they’re also going to partner with the government to make it so that you have no choice but to save – it’s for your own good, you see. 

Hmm, now where else have I recently heard that? 

Anyway, if you’re one of my northern hemisphere readers, and are not forced to pay into one of these funds, don’t worry, what I have to say also applies to you (and also, give it a little time, it probably won’t be long until your savings schemes become mandatory too). 

Regardless of whether your government makes it compulsory to save a proportion of your income (here in Australia it’s about 10%), or whether there are pension schemes you can opt into like a 401(k) in the US, the message that underpins future financial security for the average person is the same: Leave it to us, the experts – we know what we’re doing, and you don’t.  

Well, they’re actually right on both counts: Most people have no clue what they’re doing, because they have grown up in societies where it simply isn’t discussed; and the ‘experts’ do know what they’re doing. They know exactly what they’re doing. 

What they are doing is taking your money and using it to underwrite the gigantic global Ponzi scheme that is fractional-reserve banking.   

They don’t want you knowing how it all works (which is actually relatively simple), and they certainly don’t want you managing your own money because every person who opts to do so weakens their balance sheet. 

The international finance system is a racket, and, like all rackets, it relies on the centralisation of wealth and power; and as the primary centralising force of wealth and power on the planet it is by definition the biggest racket on the planet. 

So it makes sense that they want to keep as much of your money centralised as they can, where they can control it and shuffle it around to service the ballooning debt on this bloated carcass of insolvency known as the Liberal World Order.  

But in recent years this delightful swindle has taken on a new and even more concerning facet: ESG. 

For the uninitiated, this stands for Environmental, Social, and corporate Governance, and it is a virtue-based credit score applied to companies by big institutional investment houses like BlackRock and Vanguard. Put simply, it is the corporate manifestation of wokeism.  

It stems directly from the World Economic Forum’s cloudy concept of ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and basically subjugates businesses to various criteria that have nothing to do with profitability, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion; and Net Zero – thus fundamentally transforming capitalism into a system based not on productivity and profit, but ideology. 

This is the central enforcement mechanism that underpins The Great Reset.  

Screeds can be read on ESG and you’ll find both enthusiastic endorsement (all pushed to the top of your Google search) and scathing criticism also, which you’ll need to dig a lot deeper for, but Kim Iversen’s brief discussion is a good primer. Harry Robinson also did a good segment on BlackRock and ESG the context of the UK’s recent political clown show (jump in at 10 minutes if you want to skip the preamble).  

Wherever your retirement money is invested (if it is with an asset management firm, as opposed to your own actively managed portfolio) a key metric now influencing the decisions of the people managing your money is ESG. 

This means that the traditional fiduciary responsibility of money managers has been abdicated because the people at the top have redefined the concept of one party acting in the best interests of another. No longer does this mean that Party 1 has a responsibility to try to achieve the best material outcome for Party 2; it now means that Party 1 has only limited responsibility to Party 2 and can also use their money for the perceived good of Parties 3, 4, 5… and so on, the ultimate party of course being the planet – perhaps we should aptly name this one: Party Zero.  

Jump onto your asset manager’s website and search for ‘ESG’ and ‘sustainability’ and you’ll see that they’re up to their eyeballs in it. Big or small, boutique or behemoth, they’ve all signed on. 

As for the motivations behind this scheme? You can form your own conclusions, and I’ll be exploring this further in future articles. Do you believe the planet is going to go up in smoke or be swallowed by the ocean unless we radically overhaul our way of life by destroying our energy and food systems with the help of mechanisms like corporate ESG scores? If so then you probably have nothing to worry about right? 

If not, you may wish to do as I’ve done and liberate your money from the asset managers. This can be a complicated process and in places like New Zealand it is almost impossible. In Australia you can set up a self-managed super fund (SMSF) as I’ve done, and online brokerage companies such as Stake make it much easier and cheaper than dealing with the tax office on your own. 

I’m currently waiting for my funds to be rolled over from one of Australis’s largest superannuation funds into my new SMSF trading account – and I plan to dump the lot into Tesla stock (that’s not financial advice by the way) and regardless of how this decision pans out for me long-term, the satisfaction I am feeling at having taken my money back from the machine to do with as I wish is unparalleled thus far in my journey of awakening.  

Ironically, as Kim Iversen alludes, I may be doing more to support so-called ‘sustainability’ in withdrawing from the ESG-based investment strategy of my erstwhile asset managers and buying stock in the world’s leading EV manufacturer instead – who’d have thought? 

None of it really makes sense, it’s a mad, mad, upside-down clown world, no doubt about it – and we’re all forced to watch its various circus acts on a daily basis. But one clown show I’ll no longer be participating in is the appropriation of my hard-earned money to service the nebulous ideological whims of the New World Order.