California Congressional Candidate Proposes Legislative Ban on Public Retirement Funds of Investments in China

Alison Hayden, who is currently running for Congress in California, is taking initiatives to protect public retirees from losing money in their retirement accounts due to high-risk investments in China.

“Americans retired, 65 and older collecting retirements, close to 50 percent of them are on federal or state retirement systems,” said Hayden during an interview with the Epoch Times. Hayden is on the ballot in the coming November election for California’s 14th Congressional District.

“If those pension funds are not reliable and secured, we are looking at a catastrophic problem,” Hayden asserted.

In a legislative initiative, Hayden has stated four reasons that the U.S. public retirement funds should not be invested in China-based stocks, bonds, or mutual funds:

The Chinese regime does not allow any free flow of information and independent media. The Chinese authorities actively criminalize anyone who reports on negative political and economic news from China. The judicial system in China is not independent, and often rules against foreign corporations and investors with legitimate claims against Chinese entities. In the past, China-based companies, such as Lukin Coffee (NASDAQ: LK) and Kingold (NASDAQ: KGJI), were caught with serious frauds that had hurt U.S. investors. Workers in China are not allowed to form independent labor unions.

Lukin Coffee is a Chinese coffee company and coffeehouse chain headquartered in Xiamen City, China. In April 2020, the company reported to have inflated its 2019 sales revenue by close to $310 million, which resulted in the crash of its stock price. The company was later delisted from NASDAQ in June 2020. Lukin filed for chapter 15 bankruptcy in February 2021.

Kingold Jewelry was a NASDAQ-listed Chinese company. The company was reported in 2020 using 83 tons of gold bars as loan collateral to secure a $2.8 billion loan. Those gold bars turned out