(Washington)

The SEC rule has received a lot of attention. Those in the industry have been moderately positive on the rule because of its degree of leniency, but no one really thinks it is a good rule, especially not investor protection advocates. Today we ready an opinion of the rule by an industry laywer, and it was so compelling, we had to share it in its entirety. The below is from Steven Lofchie of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP: “Now, in many respects, we have ended up with the worst of all possible situations: (i) the Reg. BI adopting release fails to make any strong intellectual argument for why it is not reasonable to expect that broker-dealers can be fiduciaries to their clients; (ii) Reg. BI fails to make any distinction between sophisticated and unsophisticated natural person clients (treating Warren Buffett no different from a high school dropout); (iii) Reg. BI imposes significant new obligations on broker-dealers that very well may reduce the willingness of broker-dealers to provide "full-service" brokerage to retail investors and instead result in retail investors seeking any level of advice to potentially pay a much higher charge to an investment adviser; (iv) Reg. BI fails to satisfy any of the critics who wanted a fiduciary obligation imposed on broker-dealers; and (v) states are adopting their own "suitability" rules - urged on by Commissioner Jackson - thereby moving U.S. securities regulation away from a unitary system of regulation to a fractured Brexit system.”.

FINSUM: We have never read any commentary that does justice to the new rule better than Mr. Lofchie’s. It hits the nail on the head on why it is a failure from all sides.