It says a lot about how far Boomers have come that their proverbial bible, Rolling Stone, is focused less on sex, drugs and rock and roll, and more on retirement savings.
The publication that Jann built is out with a piece on the looting of the American retirement system by Wall Street fat cats—evergreen adversaries that provide a constant and convenient foil.
“In the past two months, the Trump’s Labor Department has introduced two pending changes to deregulate vulturous private equity firms and multi-trillion-dollar retirement managers like Vanguard, Fidelity, and BlackRock,” Rolling Stone writes. “A third proposed change would restrict retirement investments with an underlying environmental, social, or governance mission—mainly to boost the struggling fossil-fuel industry.”
Roper’s reaction
While noting Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia’s past ties to big business, it quotes fierce fiduciary fighter Barbara Roper, director of Investor Protection at the Consumer Federation of America, noting that “Secretary Scalia is still working for his former clients. This is a multipronged attack on Americans’ retirement security.”
After briefly reviewing the concept of retirement for the benefit of Millennials and Zoomers (seriously), it praises defined benefit plans of yesteryear while noting recent fiduciary breach lawsuits, mentioning the Massachusetts Institute of technology and Fidelity Investments specifically.
After running through arguments with provocative headings like “A Fossil-Fueled 401k” and “Foxes Guarding the Retirement Coop,” the piece ends with a call to action of sorts by noting, “Then again, Scalia’s only calling the shots so long as Trump is in the White House…”
“Putting aside the substance of this article—some of which I agree with and some of which I do not—what is really “blowing my mind” is the notion of Rolling Stone magazine writing an article about a DOL Information Letter (on PE), a proposed PTE (on fiduciary), and a proposed reg (on ESG),” American Retirement Association CEO Brian Graff wrote on LinkedIn of the article. “These are really ‘crazy times’ man.”
Comments, of course, ran supportive and critical of the article:
“This pattern of finding ways to loot the public’s share of the fruits of the labor accomplished by all of us is a type of behavior seen in unscrupulous elites (not all elites are unscrupulous) throughout human history,” read one. “How do we break this pattern?”
Said another:
“Interesting how the author can argue against private equity as too risky but in the following paragraph argue for ESG when ESG has inherent risk since in many cases it minimizes performance potential for social or environmental causes.”
With more than 20 years serving financial markets, John Sullivan is the former editor-in-chief of Investment Advisor magazine and retirement editor of ThinkAdvisor.com. Sullivan is also the former editor of Boomer Market Advisor and Bank Advisor magazines, and has a background in the insurance and investment industries in addition to his journalism roots.
