The Department of Labor recently released its new fiduciary rule. I covered the initial announcement here. These are direct links to the parts of the rulemaking package:
Other PTE Amendments: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/EBSA/laws-and-regulations/laws/erisa/retirement-security/prohibited-transaction-exemptions-75-1-77-4-80-83-83-1-and-86-128.pdf
The New York Times has also covered the release. I contributed my view to the piece. As I see it, if printing a financial adviser's disclosers will run your printer out of toner, you should just find a different financial adviser.
The simplest way to buy advice is to hire a “fee-only” independent certified financial planner who is a registered investment adviser, which means they are required to act as fiduciaries when providing investment advice about securities (stocks, mutual funds and the like). As part of that fiduciary duty, they must eliminate conflicts or disclose them.
“Your odds of conflicts go up, the longer their disclosures are,” said Benjamin Edwards, a professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Las Vegas.
There will be much more on this to come. The rule is great for ordinary people because it uniformly raises standards for advice about their retirement account money. One of the major problems in this space is that lots of different people offer "financial advice" to retirement savers under different standards. Insurance producers are probably the most loosely regulated and also the most likely to oversell complex financial products for a quick payday. The rule applies whether someone is a broker, registered adviser, or an insurance producer. It's the same standard for people doing the same basic thing.
Some of the industry opposition and litigation defense strategies often revolve around "personal responsibility." And there is something to that. People should understand what's going on when they invest significant sums. But the reality is that people hire or work with financial advisers because they need advice. If they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't need any help. We need to make it safer for people to trust their financial advisers. This rule goes a long way to help get us there.