Holy shit - Paul Ryan sneaks Wall Street attempt to hurt your retirement into GOP anti-poverty plan

[Yupster]

10. You read through that fact sheet and thought it sounded good?

I'm interested to see which parts sounded good to you?

What I read was a bunch of glittering generalities like the average American deserves a sound retirement, and we need to be protected from low performing investments.

What the heck is a low performing investment? CD's are pretty low performing. Do I really have to be protected from buying cd's? If I buy 100 shares of Coca Cola and it loses money for the year can I now turn it back in or sue my broker?

Then there's the ridiculous math. This will save the average American with an IRA 1 % a year. I have what most people would consider a very large IRA. I have many, many investments within it. I can't think of more than 2-3 of them that charge me more than 1 % a year. They would be my weirder mutual funds like the India or Emerging Markets fund. I realize it's expensive to research Burmese companies so I don't mind paying more for those weird ones. Anyway they're a very small part of my portfolio. The majority of my investments are individual stocks and bonds and I rarely trade them and if I don't trade them in a year I pay absolutely nothing to just hold onto them. So the saving 1 % a year on average I just see as a very questionable statistic.

The funniest part of the whole thing is when it says that the rule was developed in close consultation with firms of the industry. Yeah for two years the DOL has been putting out versions and the industry has been pointing out how it couldn't work in practice and the DOL would pull it back and then rework it. Yeah it was developed with much industry input. The input was pointing out that they had no idea how they would even try to comply with these rules. What does the best interest of the client even mean?

There was such cooperation that the lawsuits are already lining up.

But in the end people will think things are better because who could be against acting in the best interests of the clients?

Costs to the clients will go up and small investors will have trouble getting and keeping an adviser. Most brokers will make much more money though so at least there's that.