Wall Street could seize your retirement savings in the next financial crash — and it's perfectly legal

Investigation uncovers how banking institutions secretly altered securities laws in the 1970s, prioritizing Wall Street over individual investors. Opinion Wall Street could seize your retirement savings in the next financial crash — and it's perfectly legal Little-known changes to laws allow financial institutions to claim customer securities as collateral during a crisis By Justin Haskins Fox News Published February 15, 2026 8:00am EST Facebook Twitter Threads Flipboard Comments Print Email Add Fox News on Google close Video President Trump takes a victory lap on recent stock market highs Fox News senior White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich has the latest on the president's response to the January jobs report and economic growth on 'Special Report.' NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! Recessions and stock market crashes are inevitable in a market-based economy, but few Americans realize that their investments face risks far greater than falling stock prices. Because of largely unknown legal changes, millions of Americans could temporarily or even permanently lose their retirement and other investment savings in the next major financial crash, all while too-big-to-fail Wall Street firms and banks are protected.That might sound like a wild conspiracy theory, but the danger is real and well documented.How Wall Street centralized ownership of your investments STEPHEN MOORE: FROM DOW 800 TO 50,000--REAGAN, TRUMP AND THE SUPPLY-SIDE MIRACLE Beginning in the 1970s, at the request of powerful Wall Street and banking institutions, state lawmakers quietly adopted a series of changes to the Uniform Commercial Code, a body of law enacted in all 50 states. These changes effectively allowed financial institutions to reassign direct ownership of most securities away from individual investors, including those holding retirement accounts and traditional brokerage accounts. Your retirement isn't as safe as you think, thanks to changes in the law. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Under the revised legal framework, direct ownership of securities such as stocks and bonds was centralized within a single financial institution controlled by Wall Street’s largest firms and banks: the Depository Trust Company, or DTC.Today, DTC "provides custody and asset servicing for 1.44 million security issues from more than 170 countries and territories valued at more than US $100 trillion as of 2025." To put that figure in perspective, the entire federal budget is roughly $7 trillion. In January, I released a new book, "The Next Big Crash: Conspiracy, Collapse, and the Men Behind History’s Biggest Heist," to explain how this legal framework was constructed, why it poses grave risks to consumers today, and to uncover the remarkable conspiracy behind DTC’s creation. The book is the culmination of years of research, and the evidence it presents is nothing short of stunning.Why this system exists and what it replacedThe Depository Trust Company sits at the center of the modern securities ownership model. Major banks and broker-dealers, with the help of a mysterious figure with a long history of working for and alongside the CIA, created DTC in the early 1970s with the stated goal of alleviating Wall Street’s growing paperwork crisis. CAROL ROTH: THE MONEY IN YOUR 'SAFE' SAVINGS ACCOUNT COULD VANISH OVERNIGHT Video At the time, buying and selling securities was a slow, paperwork-heavy process. By centralizing registered ownership of securities in a single institution, transfers could be executed simply by changing records, which today occurs electronically. What once took several days could be completed almost instantly. Lawmakers were told this shift was a technical modernization designed to improve efficiency and reduce risk. In many respects, it did exactly that. The cost and time required to do business on Wall Street dropped dramatically after DTC’s creation. But these gains came at a steep price. Centuries of property law were effectively discarded. Traditional securities ownership, grounded in clear title and constitutional protections, was replaced.Who benefits and who bears the risk?Under the current DTC model, most investors no longer directly own their securities. Instead, they hold what the law refers to as a "security entitlement." This arrangement is contractual in nature. It grants certain rights and protections, but it does not confer direct registered ownership. When you buy stock in a company, you do not actually acquire the stock itself. You get a set of investment rights tied to that stock. NICKI MINAJ TO DONATE THOUSANDS TO TRUMP ACCOUNTS PROGRAMThis system raises serious ethical concerns. It delivers enormous benefits to the most powerful financial institutions while weakening the ownership rights of ordinary investors. Centralized ownership allows securities transactions to be processed at extraordinary speed, fueling ever-increasing activity and on Wall Street. That activity generates massive fee revenue for large institutions. In recent years, institutions have also reaped enormous profits from riskier practices such as stock lending and deriva