A Senator Doesn't Like It When Companies Lie to Government

The U.S. Department of Labor will probably soon finalize a proposed rule requiring brokers who provide retirement advice to put the best interests of their clients ahead of their own interests. It seems reasonable to expect that this will cause some unpleasantness for those brokers. (If it wouldn't, why aren't they doing it already?) And so some brokerage firms have pushed back against the rule, trying to get the Labor Department to revise or abandon it. The way you do this, in our modern administrative state, is that you submit comment letters on the proposed rule, saying that if it's adopted as proposed, it will be a disaster for the retirement-advice industry: Costs will go up, retirees will lose access to investing advice, brokerages will go out of business and the Earth will crash into the sun.

On the other hand, some of those brokerages are also public companies, and their shareholders have questions. Questions like: If this rule is, as expected, adopted, will that be a disaster for the retirement-advice industry? How much will your costs go up? Will you go out of business? Will the Earth crash into the sun? And the way you answer those questions, in our modern age of financial capitalism, is by saying, hush hush, we have an excellent plan to adapt to new regulations, we will be fine, and we'll probably even take market share from our less adaptable competitors.