Walmart’s integration into the world of finance is deeper than share prices; it represents a ubiquitous vector by which financialization, securitization and risk management are introduced and stitched into everyday life. For instance, the firm operates one of the world’s most populous investment funds, managing the savings of over 1.2 million employees (Fitch 2010). Given that Walmart insists on addressing its employees as “associates” with whom it enters into temporary, mutually beneficial economic relationships, it does not provide pensions. However, it does offer its “associates” access to a 401(k) fund to which they are welcome to contribute (managed by the investment bank Merrill Lynch, now part of Bank of America). In this way Walmart participates in a trend towards the securitization of retirement savings that, as Robin Blackburn (2006) illustrates, works against employees’ long-term interests. While these funds may offer a competitive rate of return, they do so by investing in firms and securities that are not in workers’ long-term (or, for that matter, shortterm) interests. Along with mutual funds and other large institutional investors, these funds are partly responsible for the drive for higher corporate profits year after year, which in turn has compelled firms to cut jobs, attack unions, globalize production and seek to undermine or circumvent regulatory frameworks. It is not at all unlikely that a Walmart worker’s investment in the company-operated fund could have been used to finance (and might have accrued value from) their own exploitative sub-prime mortgage. What is key here is that, just as Walmart denies the inherent class antagonisms of its empire by insisting employees see themselves as free-agent “associates,” so, too, does it tether the economic well-being of these associates to the same market forces that ultimately drive Walmart’s exploitative practices. It is notable how this approach is cloaked in the discourse of freedom and security: employees are encouraged to “secure” their futures through individualized forms of economic “freedom” and rational “choice” (participation in the fund is, of course, optional).