Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will unveil a “Retirement Ripoff Counter” on Wednesday — a live, digital projection that will tally the financial cost of the delay of the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule for U.S. workers. Tuesday evening, the DOL released a final rule delaying the fiduciary rule by 60 days.
Warren has invited AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Americas for Financial Reform and the Consumer Federation of America to the event.
“It’s another way to generate publicity with respect to the DOL fiduciary duty rule and it’s coming from the most powerful industry critic out there in Senator Warren,” said Andrew Stoltmann, an attorney with The Stoltmann Law Offices. “She is firing all her bullets at trying to generate knowledge of what the securities industry and the DOL is trying to do, which is gutting the important law for investors in the last 20 years.”
Stoltmann’s client, 69-year-old disabled Vietnam veteran Stephen Wingate, will speak at the event about conflicted investment advice he received from a broker with Proequities that caused him to file an arbitration claim. The broker recommended he invest in high-cost non-traded REITs.
The Obama administration estimated that such conflicted advice was costing Americans $17 billion a year or $40 million per day. Based on that, the clock will calculate how much a delay would cost retirement account investors every second, similar to the National Debt Clock in New York.
“It’ll be running every second, every minute until this issued is resolved,” Stoltmann said.
The counter will be displayed on the sides of several major Washington landmarks which will be announced at the event.
