Not one penny for China: who told the TSP to invest in China?

Instapundit links to an article saying that Trumpieboy orders the Thrift savings plan to stop investing in China. LINK to Fox business.

Trump orders federal retirement money invested in Chinese equities to be pulled The assets at hand number around $4.5 billion in Chinese stocks

the background of this story:

Federal employees are able to save money for retirement with the government matching their savings.. They have five funds available to chose for these funds: One of which invests in other countries. Up to last year, this meant westernized countries.

But last year an outside company consultant pushed them to include riskier but potentially higher yield countries, and this included some funding to Chinese companies.

Those of us with TSP accounts were not informed of the change of policy at the time.

 But when it was done, some Senators and some veterans groups protested about funding China, but were ignored.

So Trump is correcting this.

Now what we need to know: Who was the outside consultant who recommended this, what were his ties with China, and who gave him the power over this quasi governmental retirement fund.

I don't know much about finance, but when the TSP board announced the plan, I did  a blogpost on it:

I posted some links there to various articles on the controversy, and about the outside "consultant" behind the decision, and about those in Congress who opposed the decision and why. I did this in case my half a dozen blog readers included a reporter who might want to dig into the matter.

Here is a small snippet from that post, where I commented on an article at the TSP website about the plan back then:

Senators on both sides of the aisle are trying to stop the board from taking retirement funds from US gov't and military employees and investing it in china.

At a FRTIB meeting Monday, Aon presented an updated study of the TSP's I Fund benchmark and recommended the board move forward with the change.

In 2017, the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board voted unanimously to change the index upon which the I Fund is based, from the MSCI Europe, Australasia and Far East Index to the MSCI All Country World Ex-US Investable Market Index, beginning sometime next year.

The move marks a shift from a predominantly Euro-centric index, along with Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, to investments in 48 markets around the world, most notably including Canada and China.;;;

Please note that only 8 percent is supposed to be for Chinese companies.

The change was due to a consulting firm named AonHewitt. At a meeting of the TSP board last month, consultants from Aon Hewitt, who originally recommended moving to the broader index in 2017, reaffirmed their recommendation.

Now if only some intrepid reporter would check if China has connections with that outside investment company (i.e. AonHewitt): which not only advised the TSP but handles a lot of retirement plans in the USA.

To paraphrase Dr. McCoy: I am a physician, not an investment banker. but even I was wondering about the way the TSP board slipped this over their investors back then, without informing us and without answering my protesting email about it.