Courtesy of Pam Martens
Christine Lazaro, President, PIABA
The long-awaited final rule from the Securities and Exchange Commission called Regulation Best Interest, which grew out of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation and was intended to require that the nation’s stockbrokers put their clients’ interests ahead of their own, was voted on by the SEC yesterday. Three Republican Commissioners voted for it while the sole Democrat, Robert Jackson, voted against it and issued a detailed statement on why it sells out Main Street.
SEC Chairman, Jay Clayton, was one of the three who voted in favor of passing the rule. Prior to joining the Trump administration as SEC Chair, Clayton was a law partner at one of Wall Street’s go-to law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell, where he had represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street banks within the prior three years. (See related articles below for how that has worked out for the American people.)
A broad range of public interest groups immediately assailed the new rule as a sellout to Wall Street and a green light for the continued fleecing of Main Street.
The proposed rule by Clayton was so bad that the Consumer Federation of America and the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association (PIABA) held a phone-based news conference the day before the vote to warn the public that the SEC was falsely claiming that the new rule would protect investors.
PIABA President Christine Lazaro, Professor of Clinical Legal Education and Director of the Securities Arbitration Clinic at St. John’s University School of Law said:
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