There was a time when, on a good day, ERISA was the ugly stepchild. When I first started practicing, I wouldn't dare utter an ERISA word to my wife - and she's a lawyer. On a good day, I could find an accountant, actuary or consultant who might be willing to talk to me.
Well, the practice evolved. Fiduciary issues became more meaty, indeed culmitnating in a 2015 speach by President Obama to the AARP that focused on . . . an ERISA defined term. That was a wow moment, which, by the way, still haunts the DOL and the courts to this day. Executive cmpanesation is now a high-profile front-and-center area that gained coverage in the mainstream press with things like option backdating.
And, I'd suggest, the TARP legislation probably would not have passed without the provisons intended to rein in executive compensation. In some ways, TARP really signaled the emergence of executive compensation as a legal, political and social hot-button.
Anyway, senior executives and investment managers now want to talk to us rather than avoid us, and every now and then I can even talk to my wife (about ERISA). From the back room to the board room, as a freind of mine likes to say.
One of the aspects of the emergence of ERISA as a mainstream topic involves the way that stock-market rises and falls are reported. In both the financial and non-financial press, often market movements are framed in terms of the impact on 401(k) accounts. That's the ERISAfication of one of the most important front-and-center news topics of all.
This last trend has now found its way to "Kill Tony - Kill or Be Killed", the first outing in Tony Hinchcliffe's series (which, by the way, apparently gets its name from Quentin Tarrantino's "Kill Bill" series) to be aired on Netflix. In that show, Adam Ray's Joe Biden says, with Shane Gillis' Donald Trump keenly looking on while seated just to Joe's left, "My 401(k) is going down faster than Kam Patterson's red blood-cell count." Yeah, sure, it was a racially tinged and arguably insensitive line (no surprise, there). But it did made me laugh (or at least giggle), once I figured out the joke. (Sorry.) And, far more importantly, wherever you stand politically: chalk up another one for ERISA in the world of stand-up comedy
No comments:
Post a Comment