Hi John,
Most people assume that when they hire a financial adviser to roll over their pension or 401(k) into a new investment account, that adviser will put the customers’ interests first.
The majority of retirement advisers do good, honorable work—but believe it or not, in the year 2024, there is no federal rule on the books requiring retirement advisers to do what’s in the best interest of their customers. This means that in many states, it’s legal for shady advisers to stick you with retirement products that are not good for you because they’ll get a free trip to Hawaii or Cancún for meeting an annuity company’s sales quota.
Back in 2016, the Obama administration tried to fix this shocking loophole by passing a strong new “fiduciary rule,” until Eugene Scalia—a corporate mega-lawyer who later became Donald Trump’s secretary of labor—found a far-right federal appeals court to overturn it.
President Biden and the Department of Labor are once again trying to enact a strong fiduciary rule, but Wall Street lobbyists and corporate lawyers are doing everything they can to stop it. They’re flooding Capitol Hill right now with misinformation and flat-out lies to kill the rule again—trying to sell Congress on the idea that financial advisers would stop working with lower-income Black and Latino families if they couldn’t get perks, bonuses or kickbacks out of it. (Give us a break!)
Your House and Senate members are hearing from the Wall Street smear machine, but they need to hear from working people like you. Will you take two minutes to call your members and urge them to support a strong fiduciary rule?
