The few US equities in my retirement fund don’t track the S&P500 or Nasdaq. They track an index by Solactive in Frankfurt and are weighted by float (the value of shares available for public trading) not market capitalization (the value of all shares, including the ones owned by the company). They also require that a stock be at least ten days after IPO to be included. I think they will be a more resistant to bending the rules than an American index although I would not put it past German banks to buy tranches of bad debt from the Amerikaner.

You check what you own, especially your bond fund (government bonds are safe, if it has anything else look closely) and your investments in financial firms (see if any of them have been buying up this bad debt). Company-run pension plans are usually scams (a financial institution sells them a bunch of expensive actively managed products not a few cheap index funds) but picking the best of a bad lot still has big returns and sometimes it just takes one or two employees to get them to add something much better to the list.

That’s the neat part, you don’t!

Actually a very valid question. This is how they get you.

I pulled all of my retirement out of the stock market. Ill probably be screwed later, but at least I know that nobody is using my money to make themselves richer.