May 4, 2020
Dear SEC,
My Bride and I, aged 76 and 82 have several small IRA and joint brokerage accounts. In order to protect our investments we have small amounts of inverse funds in all of our accounts to help protect our investments from the ravages of overenthusiastic money creation by the federal reserve bank. These recent episodes have occurred in 1987, 2000-2002, 2008-2009 and again now in 2020.Their stated goal of money creation (inflation) is 2% which means every 35 years our dollar only buys 50% less product and in our lifetimes 75% less product. Thats bad enough but during times of extra money creation such as 1975-1980, 2000 2008 and again now our dollar value decreases even faster. Over 60 years of our working career were required to attain the savings that we do have. In 1956 one of us bought a new car for $1,600and today it costs $20,000-$35,000. The same is true, or worse, for gasoline, houses, and everything else we buy. So one very small way we can try to preserve our savings is to utilize inverse funds to do it.
And now the SEC is thinking of eliminating this way small investors have of protecting our ability to survive during our years of retirement. We understand the methods inverse funds utilize in order to help reduce our portfolio losses during times like we are having today. We do not believe we require third party intervention in our investing choices. Therefore, we would be pleased to have less help from our capitol in even thinking about reducing our investment choices.
The federal reserve and our treasury department have an unstated goal of trying to keep the markets from ever decreasing because when it happens it is bad for politics. Therefore, essentially free overnight money almost always helps sustain market rallies and hardly ever goes to main street America because it is impossible to buy a tractor or a house with overnight money. We will never see any of that money so it all goes to the markets, bankers and politicians. So if there is going to be any more government control then the highlighted organizations in this paragraph are desperately requiring such attention.
Thank you for your time and attention, R.W and N.C. Leonardson