A Labor Department fiduciary rule that applies to retirement accounts would lead to "bifurcated rules" instead of a uniform policy that covers all types of brokerage accounts for individual investors, said the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association in a statement on Wednesday.
Ketchum has long believed that a broker fiduciary standard "is the direction we must go," he said.
Nonetheless, he was "disappointed" by "recent rhetoric about the broker-dealer industry and its regulation that accompanied the Labor proposal." He later declined to identify or elaborate the sources of that rhetoric.
In February, however, the Labor Department plan gained a higher national profile when President Barack Obama announced his support. He said it would protect investors from being steered into costly retirement investments that produced high commissions for brokers but low returns for investors.
Some investor advocacy groups fired back at Ketchum in statements.
"It is revealing, but not surprising, that the head of Wall Street’s self-regulator would be against requiring Wall Street’s brokers to act in their clients’ best interest rather than in the brokers’ own economic interests," said Dennis Kelleher, president and chief executive of Washington-based Better Markets.
Wall Street conflicts of interest cost investors $17 billion a year, Kelleher said.