Take The Money and Run

The retiree looking to guarantee principal and participate in the upside, when and where it occurs, will
want to move their retirement accounts into a Fixed Indexed Annuity (FIA).

It is a recurring theme in these posts that retirees, once having accumulated a substantial balance in
their retirement accounts, should “take the money and run”. Why is this so? It is because the unique
market conditions and Federal Reserve (FED) interventions imposed since the Great Financial Crisis in
2008 will not, indeed cannot, repeat themselves. In short, the economic environment we have come to
know is not sustainable.

The massive money printing committed by the FED since 2008 and, particularly, since Covid has first
caused inevitable yet unwarranted asset price inflation — the assets inside your retirement accounts.
And now, just as inevitably, we have producer price inflation and its consequent consumer price
inflation.

That means your retirement account balance has been synthetically induced to nominal “values”
beyond what they would have been had the free market been allowed to operate without the monetary
manipulation committed by the FED. Here we are talking about successive waves of Quantitative Easing (QE), and even “this is not QE” when they got tired of saying QE. Additionally, we are confronted with fraudulent metrics, seasonal adjustments, and post hoc revisions of official quarterly reports. We are being lied to. We urge you to check out shadowstats.com for honest metrics. Kudos to John Williams.

This is why we say, “take the money and run”, because much of the “growth” over the past several years represents ill-gotten gains in the sense that they were not generated by legitimate market forces or a robust economy, or the financial strength of the various companies whose stock you probably own
embedded in some mutual fund or managed account. The current structure is unsustainable as
evidenced by its dismal performance in 2022 and Jerome Powell’s angst ridden, staged managed, kabuki theater press conferences. (Indecently, while you may have suffered a serious hit in 2022, holders of FIA’s lost zero dollars and, in many cases, enjoyed respectable returns.)
HINT: Just as the passengers of the Titanic learned that there were not enough lifeboats, many retirees
who stay at the party too long will pay dearly. In fact, as one observer cynically put it, “the dumb money stays in too long, thus providing the smart money with an off ramp”.
The FIA is your lifeboat – your sanctuary at the end of the offramp. Take it while your retirement is still
relatively intact.