Market linked retirement funds, imo rank among one of the worst regressions in American governance/society.
It broke the employer:employee relationship where your work provides a pension, and you are secured in your old age for loyalty and time worked.
It directly enabled an emboldened a new group of parasites, who run hedge funds to gamble with other people’s money whilst skimming fees up and down the transaction flows. You win, I win - you loose, I win.
And those ‘smart people’ crash the economy every 10-15 years due to their collective greed and over leveraging in order to take the maximum profit they can - or society as a whole “lands softy” due to central banks fiscal policy via inflation, and we all see where that’s landed us.