揭露华尔街的最大谎言

华尔街经纪业及其游说团体正在讲述一个可怕的谎言，大意如此：

“美国中产阶级是不值得我们服务的，除非我们狠狠地收取一笔费用，并且销售一些他们不需要的产品。”

以上可能并非他们的原话，但正是这个意思。这种信息令我极度恶心，而且我也有资格对其进行专业解读。正如我在拙著《华尔街后台》（Backstage Wall Street）中所言，向投资者销售投资产品这种业务模式，无可救药地充斥着各种利益冲突。

在我职业生涯的前半段，我就像机器上的一个螺丝钉，在一家三级券商向普通投资者销售投资产品。我亲眼见证了这些矛盾。我也深知，当华尔街与普罗大众的利益发生碰撞时会发生什么事情。这些年来，我一直在尝试着说出真相。但直到现在，导致不良行为的那些动机依然存在。在当前的经纪人薪酬体制下，哪怕是最心系客户的经纪人，也会经常面临自己的佣金与客户利益相矛盾的情况。一般说来，经纪人要想拿到最丰厚的佣金，就得销售那些让客户缴纳最高费用的产品，以及效益不佳的产品。

在其他行业，如果某种产品售价更高，那往往意味着其质量和功效也更高——比如名表和豪车，或者路边的小旅馆和丽嘉酒店的区别。而金融服务产品则恰恰相反。几乎所有学术研究都指出，你为一个投资产品花得钱越少，这个投资产品越简单，它的长期投资价值才越高。

华尔街也深知这一事实。不可否认，高昂的费用和过高的交易成本会损害一个退休账户的长期潜在价值，显然有悖于投资者的利益。

然而，证券经纪业务正是以销售更高成本的投资产品为基础的，因为这就是利润之源。全美基金公司对经纪公司销售团队的薪酬激励模式，是一个必须被连根拔起的肿瘤。顾问与客户之间这种与生俱来的矛盾，也需要为现今若隐若现的“退休危机”负一定的责任。另外，美国公众之所以对金融行业持一边倒的负面看法，也与这种矛盾也有一定关系。

好消息是，我们已经站在了一个岔路口上。奥巴马政府正在全行业推动所谓的“信托标准”。美国劳工部打算用这个标准，替代目前这套较弱，同时也含混不清，不容易给普通投资者带来满意结果的“适用标准”。有关法案已经提交国会进行讨论，它要求经纪人在帮助投资者打理退休账户时，必须扮演一个没有利益冲突的信托顾问的角色。任何头脑清醒的正常人都会认同，这显然才是一条正确的路。

但一涉及到政治，跟我们打交道的并不总是正常人。投资经纪行业是一个非常强大的行业，其游说团体会不遗余力地为他们争取利益。据美国经济顾问委员会估算，目前该行业采取的“适用标准”导致美国家庭多缴纳的费用和蒙受的损失约在170亿美元左右。而结合10份独立研究来看，美国老百姓真正损失的成本很可能在85亿到330亿美元之间。眼看煮熟的鸭子要飞了，难怪投资经纪们要组团抵制新规则了。

而真正令人惊讶的，则是他们为了争辩哪种规则对投资者最好而采取的说辞。上周，华尔街迎来了一位好帮手——美国众议院议长保罗•莱恩对奥巴马政府的提议大加抨击。他表示，信托规则会带来过多的监管以及繁琐程序，甚至会逼迫经纪机构不得不放弃为小额客户提供服务。

在他的官方博客上，莱恩用这样一个语带嘲讽的名词解释抨击信托标准：

信托规则：名词（2016年），一种监管手段，由劳工部制定。

1：奥巴马政府提出的一种一刀切的监管手段。2：给金融规划人员带来了更多的文书工作和备案要求，限制了700多万拥有个人退休金账户的美国人获得高质量的投资建议。3：提高了人们获取财务建议的成本，对小额账户家庭造成了严重损害。

例句：

奥马巴政府的信托规则，将损害数百万辛勤工作、为退休做打算、为未来省钱的美国人。

众议院共和党人正在安•瓦格纳、菲尔•罗、彼得•罗斯克姆等议员的带领下，努力保护千万个家庭免受信托规则的伤害。

民主、共和两党都认为，政府应该放弃这一动议，从头做起。

莱恩的逻辑令人瞠目结舌。这番话简直就是说，有些人的便宜是非占不可的，这样才值得投资公司为他们服务。我认为，在这个问题上，莱恩站在了错误的一面，同样他也站在了历史的对立面。但更重要的是，莱恩认为，对于普通投资者来说，哪怕是有利益矛盾的咨询，也比没有咨询强。他的看法至少有两个谬误之处。

首先，这番言论彻底偏离了美国的价值观。在这个国家，我们不会容忍任何一个其他行业如此运作，不论是公开的还是隐蔽的。

更重要的是，这是一个谎言，一个可怕的谎言。

时至2016年，我们已经进入了一个空前未有的金融技术创新时代。对于普通人来说，从来没有一个时代比现在更适合出手投资。当代的股票和证券买家拥有几乎无限的选择权，可以极为高效，以相当低成本的途径进入投资市场。手续费和交易成本已经大幅降低。与此同时，各种创新的集中爆发，也使得自动化的咨询服务和交易所交易基金产品如雨后春笋般涌现。

以往一名投资者如果想通过经纪人买入一支A股基金，需要先期缴纳超过5%的手续费。而如今，向任何一个对现代投资渠道稍有了解的人提出这样的要求，都会让人笑掉大牙。

以Vanguard为例。该公司的低成本指数基金目前管理着超过3万亿美元的资金，投资者需要向它缴纳的费用，只是所谓的全面服务型经纪人收费的一个零头。讽刺的是，在面向散户的基金里，几乎没有一个高成本基金的绩效能在任何一个有意义的时间段里超过它。这个证据相当有力，甚至没有必要引用任何旁证来证明——没有任何一份研究能驳倒这个结论。

目前市面上还有两个知名度比较高的自动化咨询服务平台，分别是Betterment和Wealthfront。运营仅仅几年后，它们便已经分别管理着30多亿美元的目标导向型投资组合。嘉信理财也开始提供类似服务，除了对现金余额收取一点利息，它不向客户收取任何费用。

如果你有更高要求的话，Personal Capital和富达等公司还提供更丰富的服务，他们可以为投资者指定一名真人顾问，但由于大量工作流已经自动化了，所以客户只需支付极低的成本即可。

此外，市场上还有一些传统的咨询机构，比如我的公司。我们是一家注册投资顾问公司（RIA），主要为高净值和超高净值的投资者服务。以往每当有中等收入的投资者上门寻求帮助，而我们又不得不婉拒他的请求时，心里都是万分纠结。如今，让我们颇为自豪的是，在高科技的帮助下，我们也启动了一项机器人顾问服务，它可以为以往我们没有能力服务的普通家庭提供投资建议。

我认为，最多不出5年，每一家稍有规模的注册投资顾问公司都将推出类似的解决方案。这样一来，普通投资者就不必向存在着无可救药的利益矛盾的经纪公司寻求帮助了。

美国是一个总在寻找新方法做事的国家。我们每个人都期望，一个健康繁荣的退休金体系为各阶层的美国民众提供可接受的投资选择。如果投资经纪行业这类既得利益集团容许市面上出现其它方式来满足这个目标，那么它还可以再次迎来繁荣发展的机会。幸运的是，这些选择已经存在，而且每天都在变得更加强健。

不幸的是，在美国，靠向广大投资者销售质量可疑且价格偏高的投资产品来赚钱，是一种有着悠久历史的行为。另外，一个政客如果不从金融服务行业拿钱，就很难当选，不管你属于哪个党，也不管你来自这个国家的哪个地区。保险公司、券商、基金公司和政客背后的其他金主们是绝对不会坐以待毙的。

甚至到了现在，华尔街还在拼命策划用其它什么东西替换掉劳工部提出的信托规则，并纷纷抱怨称，该规则给行业造成的压力太大。比如最近我听到了一个颇有乔治•奥威尔风格的措词，叫做“最大利益标准”。真正的信托投资顾问都比较抵触这个提法，因为它划了一个虚假的等号，把单纯朴实的投资者搞得更糊涂了——他们本来就很难理解“顾问”和“经纪”之间有什么区别。

其实大可不必如此。信托标准完全可以让金融顾问和他们的客户都满意。在大西洋对岸就有一个鲜活的例子。

2006年，英国进行了一次“零售分销评估”，试图了解在存在利益冲突的情况下，普通投资者的利益受金融顾问的影响有多大。此次评估给出的建议于2013年正式立法生效。特别值得注意的是，销售投资产品的零售经纪佣金被取消了。

在那次金融规则改革之前，伦敦金融城（也就是华尔街的英国版）也是大叫大闹，称改革必将导致数百万投资者再也没法获得投资建议，必然导致大量裁员，一些善意的投资顾问也没法造福民众了。3年后的事实证明，这些极端的预测都是危言耸听。虽然目前在英国金融服务管理局注册的金融顾问的确少于2011年（目前为3.1万人，2011年为4万人），但其中至少一个原因是，这是全国现象，英国所有部门都在面临改革，同时对金融顾问的审查也更严了。而事先很多人担忧的“知识断层”并未实质出现。现代技术使得英国客户有了更多渠道，能够从那些已经规范了自身行为，并致力于提供没有利益矛盾的服务模式的顾问那里获得投资建议。

在围绕信托标准的这场争论中，究竟哪方会输、哪方会赢，抑或双方是否会达成某种折衷，目前还不得而知。不管结果如何，这个行业最终将不得不放弃“利益矛盾是服务所需”这样的弥天大谎。而技术创新和美国资本主义的不竭动力，也必将能再次找到一种有利可图的方式，改善金融服务业的生存状态。（财富中文网）

本文作者Joshua Brown是财富管理公司Ritholtz Wealth Management的CEO，该公司去年启动了一项机器人咨询服务。他还是热门理财博客“The Reformed Broker”的撰稿人。

译者：朴成奎

审校：任文科

There’s a horrendous lie being told by the brokerage industry and its army of lobbying groups. It goes something like this:

“Middle-class Americans are not worth serving if we can’t charge them egregious fees and sell them products that they do not need.”

They’re not using that exact language, but this is precisely what they’re saying. This message disgusts me personally and I’m in a unique position to comment on it professionally. As I documented in my book Backstage Wall Street, the business model of selling investment products to investors is hopelessly rife with conflicts.

For the first half of my career, I was a cog in the machine, working at third-tier broker-dealers and selling products to the masses. I saw these conflicts firsthand. Over the years since, I’ve tried to get the truth out there about what I’d seen when Wall Street and Main Street collide. But the incentives that create bad behavior are still there. Under the current compensation regime, even the best intentioned brokers are continually put in a situation where what’s best for their own paycheck is not always what’s in their clients’ best interest. Brokers are routinely compensated the most heavily for selling the products that cost their clients the most in fees and lost performance.

In other industries, higher-priced products are typically superior in both quality and efficacy—think luxury watches and cars, or the difference between a roadside motel and the Ritz-Carlton. With financial services products, however, it works in exactly the opposite way. Virtually every single piece of academic research ever produced on the topic says that the less you pay for an investment product, and the simpler it is, the better off you’ll be over the long-term.

Wall Street knows this for a fact. It’s undeniable that high fees and excessive trading costs damage the long-term potential of a retirement account and work against investors.

Unfortunately, the brokerage business is predicated on selling the higher cost solutions because that’s where the profit margins are. The incentives paid by fund companies to brokerage firm sales forces across the country are a cancer that must be rooted out. This built-in conflict between advisor and client is partially responsible for the nation’s looming retirement crisis. It also plays a role in the finance industry’s almost universally negative perception among Americans.

The good news is, we are at a crossroads. There’s a push right now from the Obama administration to extend a “Fiduciary Standard” across the industry. The Department of Labor is proposing this standard would take the place of the weaker and more nebulous “Suitability Standard” that now exists and leads to unsatisfactory outcomes for regular people. New legislation is now before congress that would force brokers to act as non-conflicted fiduciary advisors when helping investors with their retirement accounts. Any normal person with a functioning brain would agree that this is obviously the way things should work.

But when it comes to politics, we’re not always dealing with normal people. The brokerage industry is powerful and its lobbying groups play the game fiercely. The Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) estimates that the current suitability standard costs U.S. households some $17 billion in excess fees and adverse performance. A combination of ten independent studies estimates that the true cost is likely between $8.5 billion and $33 billion! There is a lot of money on the line, so the opposition to new rules should not come as a shock.

What’s shocking, however, is the tack they’re taking in framing this as a debate over what is best for the investor class. Last week, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan gave Wall Street an assist by slamming the Obama administration’s proposal, claiming, along with others, that the fiduciary rule will lead to so much excess regulation and red tape that brokerage firms will have to give up on servicing smaller investor accounts.

On his official blog, Ryan lashed out at the Fiduciary Standard rule with this mock definition:

fi•du•ci•a•ry rule [fi-doo-shee-er-ee rool], noun (2016): regulation, Department of Labor.

1 : A one-size-fits-all regulation from the Obama administration.2 : Creates more paperwork and costly record-keeping requirements for financial planners, restricting access to quality investment advice for upwards of 7 million Americans with IRAs. 3 : Results in higher costs for people seeking financial advice, disproportionately hurting families with smaller bank accounts.

Example Sentences:

The Obama administration’s fiduciary rule will hurt millions of hardworking Americans trying to plan for their retirements and save for the future.

House Republicans, led by Reps. Ann Wagner (R-MO), Phil Roe (R-TN), and Peter Roskam (R-IL), are working to protect families from the harmful fiduciary rule.

Democrats and Republicans agree that the administration should abandon this proposal and go back to the drawing board.

The logic here is astounding. The argument is literally that some people need to be taken advantage of in order for them to be worthwhile clients. I believe Ryan is on the wrong side of this issue and on the wrong side of history. But more than that, his argument—that somehow conflicted advice is better than none at all—is wrong for at least two reasons.

For starters, it’s cynical to the point of being downright un-American. We don’t allow any other industry in this country to operate this way, openly or otherwise.

The much bigger problem, though, is this: It’s a lie. A horrendous lie.

In 2016, we live in an age of unparalleled financial technology innovation. It has never been a better time to be an investor. The modern buyer of stocks and bonds has a nearly unlimited array of options by which to obtain extremely efficient and incredibly low-cost exposure to the investment markets. Fees and trading costs have been dropping precipitously while, at the same time, a Cambrian Explosion of sorts has given rise to all manner of automated advice services and exchange traded fund products.

The notion that an investor needs to pay upfront fees of in excess of 5% to buy an A-share mutual fund from a broker is laughable to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the modern-day options that exist.

Vanguard is now managing in excess of $3 trillion dollars in low-cost index funds that cost investors a fraction of what full-service brokers charge for the funds they are incentivized to sell. And again, the grand irony is that there are virtually no high-cost funds available to the retail public that have been able to outperform them over any objectively meaningful timeframe. The weight of the evidence here is so staggeringly one-sided that it’s not even worth citing individual studies—there’s never been one that’s been able to say otherwise.

There are two well-known automated advisory services, or robo-advisors, called Betterment and Wealthfront. After only a few years of operation, each is managing more than $3 billion in goal-oriented investor portfolios. Charles Schwab is now offering this same service with the interesting wrinkle that they are charging clients nothing other than a tiny bit of interest on cash balances.

As we move up the ladder a bit, there are slightly more hands-on services being offered by firms like Personal Capital and Fidelity, where investors can be assigned a human advisor but pay a very low cost because of how much the workflow can be automated.

And then there are traditional advisory firms like mine. We are a registered investment advisory (RIA) catering primarily to high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth investors. We used to shudder whenever we had to turn down a middle-income investor who was asking for our help. It is now a point of pride for us that technology has allowed us to launch a robo-advisory service of our own, which offers portfolios to households that we would not have previously had the capacity to service. Within five years, my best guess is that every RIA of scale will have a similar solution for investors who would have, in another era, been forced to seek help from a hopelessly conflicted brokerage firm.

We are a nation that has always strived to find new ways of doing things. Entrenched interests like the brokerage industry can thrive once they admit that there are other ways to accomplish something we all want—a healthy and thriving retirement system that offers acceptable choices for Americans of all walks of life. Fortunately, these choices currently exist and are becoming more robust by the day.

Unfortunately, there is a long and profitable tradition of selling high-cost products of dubious quality to the investing public. It’s also very hard to become an elected official without taking money from the financial services industry, no matter which party you’re affiliated with or which region of the country you hail from. Insurance companies, broker-dealers, mutual fund companies, and other backers of the status quo will not go down without a fight.

Even now, Wall Street is hard at work concocting alternatives to the proposed Fiduciary Standard rule, which they claim is unduly onerous on the industry. One Orwellian phrase I heard recently was “Best Interests Standard,” which true fiduciary investment advisors are wincing at because it draws a false equivalency that muddies the waters even further among the unsophisticated investors, who already have difficulty understanding the difference between advisers and brokers.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s entirely possible for a fiduciary standard to work to both the satisfaction of financial advisers and their clients. We have a living, breathing example right across the Atlantic.

In 2006, the United Kingdom conducted a “Retail Distribution Review” or RDR to look at how ordinary investors were being affected by conflicted financial advice. The recommendations produced by the RDR were put into effect in 2013. Notably, retail brokerage commissions for the sale of investment products were made extinct.

In the lead up to this rule change, The City—London’s version of Wall Street—kicked and screamed about how change would represent the end of financial advice for millions of investors. Mass layoffs would ensue and the regulations would make it impossible for well-meaning advisors to do their jobs. Three years later, it’s apparent that all of the worst predictions have been proven false. There are fewer advisers registered with the Financial Services Authority, than there were in 2011—31,000 vs. 40,000. But at least some of that is because of the national attrition that all sectors facing reform and increased scrutiny go through. The widely feared “guidance gap” has not materially grown. Modern technology is allowing U.K. customers more access to advice from the advisers who cleaned up their acts and committed to providing a non-conflicted service model.

It is too early to tell which side will win in the fiduciary standard debate, or whether or not there will be a compromise in place of a true change in the standard of care. Regardless of what plays out, the industry will eventually be forced to abandon the horrendous lie that conflict is a requirement for service. Technological innovation and the relentless force of American capitalism will find a way to improve the state of financial advice profitably, just as it always does.

Joshua Brown is the CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, which last year launched a robo-advisory service. He is also the author of the popular finance blog The Reformed Broker.