Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., is expected to introduce new financial reform legislation this week that excludes applying a fiduciary standard to brokers offering investment advice.
The Securities and Exchange Commission's expected move to regulate placement agents as broker-dealers instead of prohibiting investment advisers from using them won't curb influence-peddling, some critics say.
Everybody dies. Not everybody plans for it, though. That's where financial advisers come in. Few professionals are as well positioned to offer guidance on this sensitive topic — or to steer clients to specialists such as estate planners or attorneys. Indeed, financial advisers, who meet with clients on a regular basis, sometimes for years, can play a pivotal role in getting them to get their affairs in order long before they face their own mortality.
Banking giant Wachovia Corp. will pay $160 million to settle a federal investigation into laundering of illegal drug profits through Mexican exchange houses in the largest case of its kind ever brought against a U.S. bank, prosecutors said Wednesday.
If such overplayed images as Roman columns, boats, or chess pieces populate your firm's website, it is definitely time for a redesign.
Twenty years ago, investment adviser Greg Merlino woudn't take on clients unless they had at least $250,000 of investible assets.
The nascent secondary market for annuities and their guaranteed benefits could be stunted as the result of a vote last week by state insurance regulators to allow carriers to terminate the annuity benefits if a client sells the contract.
A former branch manager who headed one of the largest groups of reps at FSC Securities Corp. is suing the broker-dealer after what he claims was a thwarted and contentious attempt to buy the business from parent AIG Advisor Group earlier last year.
A Tennessee representative formerly affiliated with AIG Financial Advisors Inc. spent time making voodoo dolls of his victims to ward off their damaging testimony, prosecutors said.
The trial over a 401(k) fee lawsuit against ABB Inc. is continuing on despite a workplace shooting at one of the company's factories on Thursday, in which the shooter was a plaintiff in the suit.
Regulators shut four banks from California to Florida on Friday, boosting to 20 the number of U.S. bank failures this year following the 140 closures last year in the worst financial climate in decades.
Over the past decade, increased competition and regulatory change have had a profound effect on the way financial products and services are sold.
The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards Inc on Friday placed Oren Eugene Sullivan Jr. under interim suspension, keeping the ex-broker from using its credentials.
In a huge blow to SagePoint Financial Inc., one of three broker-dealers that make up the AIG Advisor Group Inc., its largest branch of reps and advisers is walking out the door following a bitter dispute over the latter's role and future at SagePoint.
Bowing to the political clout of the insurance and securities industries, the Financial Planning Coalition has given up its effort to get Congress to establish a definition of financial planning that would have brought thousands of insurance and securities brokers and money managers under the sway of an oversight board that the FPC seeks to create.
In the face of opposition from influential insurance and securities industry groups, the Financial Planning Coalition has moderated its ambition to get Congress to establish a broad regulatory scheme for financial planners.
The Securities and Exchange commissioner says "vague and confusing" language describing target date funds led to investor confusion when investments performed poorly during the market downturn.
The self regulatory organization ruled that Schwab's human resources group committed “gross negligence, and contributed to the damages suffered” by a former employee who claimed the brokerage had made defamatory comments on his termination notice.
