The FCA is proposing that firms offer a new ‘default’ investment option to help non-workplace pension customers save for their retirement.
Currently non-workplace pension customers have to choose their own investments from an increasingly wide range of options. This complexity can make it hard for some customers who do not take advice to choose investments that meet their retirement needs. Under the proposals, the default option would need to be an appropriately diversified basket of investments and take account of climate change and other environmental, social and governance risks. As a customer approaches retirement, their investments would be changed to lessen the impact of any market downturn on their savings.
Under the proposals, non-workplace pension providers will also warn customers holding high levels of cash and prompt them to consider investing in other assets with the potential for growth. The aim is to ensure pension savers have as big a pension pot as possible at retirement. The FCA invites responses to the Consultation Paper by 18 February 2022, when the consultation will close.
Sarah Pritchard, the FCA’s Executive Director for Markets, said:
‘People spend decades working hard to build up a pension to support them in retirement, and we want their savings to work just as hard for them. These proposals will ensure that customers who don’t take financial advice can benefit from a professionally designed investment strategy, and reduce the risk of their retirement income being eroded by inflation.
‘The proposals form part our wider work on pensions which is designed to ensure that customers are better supported throughout their pension journey.’
IE COMMENT;
The very concept of taking responsibility for your own financial wellbeing by holding cash savings is being attacked and subverted using 6th form green investment theories. To make the green choice the default setting is an underhanded trick, for not everyone believes that vast sums of taxpayers – and future pensioners – cash is being spent wisely in the stampede to decarbonise the econimies of the developed world.
Governments now openly seek to transfer wealth from individuals into State-backed climate change projects and ESG approved schemes. Laudable as many green investments may be as socially good, utopian dreams, in financial terms they might not make sense in the long run. Like crypto or token gambling, we just don’t know.
This green globalist ploy by the FCA could be extremely damaging to society, for a nation – or an individual – reduced to beggary is essentially powerless. Once the pension fund money is lost in bankrupt companies, it cannot be recovered. There is no property, land, mineral rights or even a music copyright to sell and retrieve some of the original stake. Fact is, not every offshore wind turbine farm can make money over 30-40 years, some car battery packs will actually prove to be as damaging to the environment as a disused chemical works as they rot in landfill. The gigabattery factories that made them will be held liable for clean-up costs. They will then go bust.
Uncomfortable truth: Many ESG approved investments today will be as worthless as shares in magic beans come 2050.
Investing your pension premiums with a view to making a healthy profit is not a hate crime. It should also be a set of decisions the investor makes, not governments or their public sector watchdogs. Holding cash reserves does not make you a bad citizen, merely cautious and prudent, because life throws financial emergencies at you. If you don’t control investment or purchase decisions over your own hard-earned, heavily taxed money, then are you really living in a free society?
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