It’s pretty hard to come up with a good argument against the White House’s Monday proposal to require brokers to act in their client’s best interest when it comes to retirement accounts. But the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) is a lobbying group thats gets paid to make such arguments, so it took a stab at it.
The new regulation, called the fiduciary rule, would apply to 401(K)s and other kinds of retirement savings, and it would require brokers to act in the best interest of their clients, rather than the best interest of their top line. Currently, brokers who work on commission can get paid extra to push people into high-fee funds, or encourage them to trade more often than they should. The White House said Monday that the Labor Department will release more details on the proposed plan in the coming months.
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“The financial services industry likes to claim that if they need to work in the best interests of their customers, they can’t afford to serve them,” personal finance author Helaine Olen told The Huffington Post. “Think about that for a moment.”
SIFMA would probably prefer that you didn’t.
