I spoke last week at the New England Employee Benefits Council on the Department of Labor’s efforts to redefine the word fiduciary by regulation, so as to capture within that rubric more of the vendors, providers and advisors involved in the retirement industry. Overall, my sense is the regulatory effort is over-expansive, and risks divorcing
A Perfect Storm, ERISA Style
This is not, at this point, a novel idea, but I do take credit for being one of the first to blog regularly on the thesis that we are approaching, if haven’t by now already hit, a perfect storm when it comes to retirement benefits and ERISA. The perfect storm consists of a series of
On ERISA and the Potential Liability of Senior Executives
Susan Mangiero of FTI Consulting, who blogs at Pension Risk Matters (as well as at Good Risk Governance Pays) and is one of my favorite sources of information concerning the investment and risk management realities that lie behind the façade of ERISA governed plans, is, along with a few other worthies, presenting a
Fiduciary Prudence? 9.5 Million Reasons to Care.
Here’s something very interesting, which I thought I would pass along with a couple of comments. It is the Court’s order concerning the proposed settlement of the class action at issue in George v. Kraft Food. George, which I discussed here, involved a particularly minute attack on the stock fund structure in
Speaking of New Department of Labor Regulations . . .
By the way, I and a cast of thousands (no, not really a cast of thousands; more like a very knowledgeable cast of several) will be speaking on “New Retirement Plan Regulations and Legislation Impacting 401(k) and 403(b) Plans” on Friday, March 9th. Ed Lynch of Fiduciary Plan Governance and I will be speaking on the
At the Intersection of Insurance and Plan Fiduciaries
Well, given the title of this blog, I couldn’t exactly let this decision pass unnoticed. In this decision from the Court of Appeals of New York, Federal Insurance Company v. IBM, the Court denied insurance coverage for IBM under an excess fiduciary liability (apparently) policy, for a settlement by IBM of a claim that
The ERISA Decision of the Year?
If you were going to read just one ERISA decision this year – or were starting from scratch, with a blank slate, and wanted to know the law governing breach of fiduciary duty claims under ERISA – I would read this one, Judge Holwell of the Southern District of New York’s opinion in Prudential Retirement
Fee Disclosure, the Wall Street Journal, and the Value of Regulation
Well, its 2012 and its time to pay close attention to fee disclosure involving 401(k) plans, for those of you who weren’t thinking about it already. The Wall Street Journal caught the bug yesterday, in this article that got wide play. I will tell you what about it caught my attention, which was the quote
On State Regulators and the Continued Existence of Discretionary Review
You know the old saying “let a thousand flowers bloom”? Its long been a shorthand way (ironically enough, given its origin) of referring to the idea of letting state governments and programs serve as testing grounds for different approaches to the same problem, rather than having the federal government dictate one definitive solution, in
What Vanity Fair Teaches About Fiduciary Obligations
Not to be too flippant or cynical, but whenever, over the years, I have heard an economist base a nice, highly logical, elegantly structured analysis on the underlying base assumption that investors or business people or consumers are acting rationally – without accounting for the likelihood that they won’t actually do that – I understand