President Donald Trump on Thursday is expected to sign an executive order that could make it easier for 401(k)s and other workplace retirement plans to offer employees the option of investing some of their savings in alternative investments including private equity, long the domain of institutional and “accredited” high-net-worth investors.
The order calls for the Labor Department and Securities and Exchange Commission to issue guidance to employers about providing access to those alternative investments in their retirement accounts, according to a senior White House official.
There has been a steady push in recent months by the private equity and credit industry to gain access to the more than $12 trillion market in defined-contribution workplace savings plans.
While there is no law prohibiting plan sponsors from offering private market investments to employees, they have traditionally steered clear of them because they have a fiduciary duty to provide a menu of prudent, reasonably priced investments to plan participants.
To date, private equity and private credit options have been riskier, more expensive, less transparent and less liquid than publicly traded stock and bond funds.
Executive order is just a first step
The president’s executive order won’t change policy, but it will clarify his position to the rest of the government, Jaret Seiberg, a financial services policy analyst at TD Cowen Washington Research Group, said in a research note.
That’s one reason why Seiberg doesn’t expect immediate changes to result from it. “It will still require the agencies to craft new rules. That could take into 2026,” he said.
And once those new rules are drafted, the employer as plan sponsor of a workplace plan will need to conduct its own due diligence about the new investment offerings.
Lisa Gomez, who served as the assistant secretary of labor for employee benefits security at the Labor Department from October 2022 until January of this year, said plan sponsors will have to adhere as closely as ever to their core fiduciary duties to vet the new options coming online to make decisions that are in the best interests of their plan participants and their beneficiaries.
“It’s going to be more complicated,” said Gomez, who, prior to working in government spent 30 years in the private sector as an attorney representing plan sponsors.
She recommends that sponsors recruit counsel as well as fiduciary advisers who have experience dealing with private equity to help them vet the new options. And they will need to ask for detailed presentations on fees, investment strategy and performance from multiple companies marketing new private market products.
Sponsors should probe how a new private investment option may perform relative to a similar product that to date has only been available to institutional and wealthy individual investors, she said. So if a new product is designed to address cost, transparency and liquidity concerns for participants in workplace plans governed by the Employer Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), “will that affect the returns?” Gomez asked.
What plan sponsors shouldn’t do is reject the idea of private equity out of hand because of higher costs or other factors, she said. “For the right people under the right circumstances, with the right support and education, it could be helpful.”
But, Gomez added, it’s also important for sponsors to consider what the potential downsides may be. “If anyone says there are none, I would question that,” she said. “Be careful to not get caught in the hype. But we also shouldn’t be afraid. We should learn.”
Could retirement savers benefit?
The argument among those who think retirement savers could benefit from at least indirect exposure to private markets – for example, through a fund of funds like a target date fund or as a portion of a plan’s collective investment trust available to those with managed accounts – is that it will provide greater diversification to all markets globally, given how much the private market has grown market relative to the public market in recent years.
Hal Ratner, head of research at Morningstar Investment Management LLC, notes that there are roughly 25 times more individual firms in the private equity market than in the publicly traded one.
“Firms are staying private for longer and coming to the IPO market larger and more mature. Therefore, the growth opportunities available to public market investors have become more limited,” Ratner wrote in a recent column.
Debates over safety ahead
Given all the due diligence fiduciaries will have to do, most workplace plan retirement savers aren’t likely to be given the option to invest in a private market option.
In the meantime, expect plenty of discussion over how to structure average retail investors’ access to private equity and private debt with the same kind of safeguards required under ERISA.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for instance, has been very vocal about her skepticism and concerns. The top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee is seeking more information from Empower, one of the largest recordkeepers that plans to offer its 401(k) clients a private equity option as early as next quarter.
More broadly, she is also concerned about the systemic risk the private credit market may pose to the US financial system and the US economy. In mid-July she wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, noting that there has been a 145% increase in the volume of bank loans to private debt funds. She requested that the Financial Stability Oversight Council analyze “the extent to which nonbank financial companies’ involvement in the private credit market, and growing entanglements with the core banking system, pose threats to U.S. financial stability.”
Those nonbank companies include private equity and private credit funds.
She also requested that FSOC work with the Office of Financial Research “to design and conduct an exploratory stress test of nonbank financial institutions engaged in private credit activities.”
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