I’ve written before that the entertainment value alone makes writing about the financial services industry worthwhile. However, there is a dark side as well to this scenario: the resulting brain damage. That is, the damage that occurs to an unsuspecting brain when confronted with a notion so disconnected from its understanding of the real world that it experiences a momentary overload.
I’m struggling to recover from just such a mental meltdown after having just read FINRA CEO Richard Ketchum’s sales pitch for the brokerage SRO taking over regulation of RIAs (as mandated by H.R. 4624), which he was scheduled to make at today’s congressional hearing on the matter. I’ve gone on record many times with my great respect for FINRA and its trade counterpart, SIFMA, not for their business ethics, but for their brilliant marketing acumen. They have the high-priced ability to make even the most absurd, self-serving arguments sound like the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
(Click on this link to view Ketchum’s complete testimony before the House Financial Services Committee on June 6, 2012.)
However, the Ketchum testimony before Rep. Spencer Bachus’ House Financial Services Committee isn’t that brilliant. In fact, its nine rambling pages contain only two real points—both of which are so lame as to make my brain involuntarily cry out ‘Really?’ (see my June 5 blog, Figures Don’t Lie. Well, Sometimes They Do, on the use of that happy phrase). The testimony in fact makes me wonder whether Mr. Ketchum is either so sure that FINRA is a lock to become the SRO for RIAs, or that it’s so out of the running that he decided that working on more compelling remarks is just a waste of time.
The first leg of Mr. Ketchum’s pitch is the one that FINRA and its congressional supporters have been skating on for the past three months or so: “…between the Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA, approximately 55% of [BDs] are examined annually. By contrast, according to the SEC, only 8% of registered investment advisers were examined in 2011… No one involved in regulating securities and protecting investors can be satisfied with a system where only 8% of regulated firms are examined each year. It is completely unacceptable and represents a major gap in investor protection.”
Gap? What gap? my brain started to cry in a continuous loop. Even with today’s big-government mentality in which imposing a tax or passing a law or writing a regulation seems to be synonymous with actually solving a problem, Ketchum equating exam visits with “investor protection” was more than my mind could handle.
An objective observer might point out that the actual data suggests just the opposite. In Ketchum’s own words:
“In 2011, FINRA brought 1,488 disciplinary actions… …expelled 21 firms from the securities industry, barred 329 individuals and suspended 475 from association with FINRA-regulated firms.”