Artie ain’t happy.
Reuters reports on remarks made by Former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt to a group of U.S. state securities regulators at North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), in which he called the failure of U.S. lawmakers to back the DOL’s fiduciary plan a “national disgrace.”
He also said that supporters of the proposed rule need to do more to “push back” against a political system that is “really rotten.”
Levitt was the SEC’s longest-serving chairman.
Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo., is leading a bipartisan group oppose the bill. Wagner, Andy Barr, R-Ky., David Scott, D-Ga., and Lacy Clay, D-Mo., sent a letter in late July to the DOL warning that the fiduciary proposal put forward by the Obama administration could limit access to quality financial advice for the middle class.
In a statement on Monday, Representative Wagner called Levitt “a career partisan bureaucrat” and said there were “millions of Americans who would be adversely affected” by the Labor Department’s rule.
“My legislation stops this Washington-knows-best assault on low- and middle-income savers and their access to sound financial advice,” the statement said.
According to the news service, Levitt said the SEC should have been taking the lead on fiduciary initiatives all along but political disagreements within the agency had stalled progress.
Now, “Congress is saying ‘give it to the SEC’ because they know the SEC is so politically divided that (the agency) can’t get to the issue until 2016,” Levitt said. That is when Republicans hope to control both Congress and the White House, Levitt added, whose present roles, Reuters added, include being a senior adviser at the Carlyle Group.
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.
