> Sorry, this is just rubbish. None of that money gets distributed to retirements, even if they work at Disney. What sort of lies is this? Disney is an S&P 500

> Sorry, this is just rubbish. None of that money gets distributed to retirements, even if they work at Disney. What sort of lies is this? Disney is an S&P 500 company. Many mutual funds and retirement funds track the S&P 500 and various other indices. They do this by investing money in the public companies that make up those funds. Of course it's not just S&P 500 companies that get invested in by institutional investors. Retirement funds typically seek to generate higher returns on retirement funds from younger employees. To do this, they have to invest in riskier businesses, which typically means smaller investments in larger numbers of newer businesses. Thus, to simplify things, we can pretty much say that any public company traded on a major stock exchange can (and does) affect the price of retirement savings accounts. At the core of it, every public company, regardless of their business, is simply an investment vehicle in which people can put wealth in the hopes of competing successfully against inflation. The creation of a share price increase greater than inflation increases the wealth of the shareholders, and creates new money from thin air. This creation of money is how all people can afford retirement. Simply saving your money in an account which keeps the nominal amount of cash would lead to loss from inflation. Most people will not contribute enough money to have enough in retirement savings. Thus, they depend in some way on the creation of money by private enterprise to subsidise their retirement. This is true regardless of whether retirement accounts are self-directed (as in a 401k), centrally managed (as in a pension), or government run (as in social security). The connection to self-directed and managed accounts is obvious. Governments of course rely on the creation of money to fund tax revenue that is then put towards government retirement programs.