iras

Individuals who invest in these assets using certain types of IRAs can escape taxation on investment gains.

Vanguard offers 401ks and Simple IRAs for companies to make available to their employees.

Tax-sheltered vehicles such as IRAs and 401Ks already exist specifically for retirement.

IRAs are going to beat returns on buying a house any day.

If you are a small business owner, check out SEP-IRAs.

Rest is in ETFs, mutual stock and bond funds (Index based) in combination of Traditional and Roth IRAs and taxable brokerage accounts at Fidelity and Vanguard.

For example, founders of companies who use IRAs to invest in nonpublicly traded shares of their newly formed companies can realize many millions of dollars in tax-favored gains on their investment if the company is successful.

We can switch people over to firm-independent IRAs or some other supplementary pension system to increase efficiency, and give the gains back to workers as pay rises.

If you're looking for systemic mispricing in the market, that shouldn't matter so much as there are enough tax free vehicles (such as IRAs) to smooth out these effects.

You should see the Romney Family's IRAs.

I've wondered if 401k plans and IRAs have held back small businesses because people could have spent the money to start their own businesses; it is horribly difficult to beat an S&P 500 index fund, but the popularity of those funds mean a lot of people are spraying money at them.

Also, I wonder if 401ks and IRAs have that much weight in the grander view of "invested" money saved away, considering their tax-deductability, and thus appeal as a savings plan, is limited and constrained (this year: $18k for a 401k, $5.5K ($6.5K if you're over 50) for IRAs).

An additional, related problem is that the only personal saving and investing option available to most people is "buy one or more Financial Services products": Savings accounts, stocks, bonds, funds, 401(k)s, Roth IRAs, even pensions which are long gone.