Bill will help protect your investments

The passage, or failure, of a single piece of legislation will tell us a lot about whether our Congress represents the people of the United States or just its financial service industry donors. The legislation is the Restoring Main Street Investor Confidence and Protection Act, HR 3482 and Senate bill S 1725. The website govtrack.us gives the bill only a 23 percent chance of passage. The Restoring Main Street Investor Confidence and Protection Act would define the value of a person’s brokerage account — or “net equity” — as the value of the account based on the last statement from the brokerage house. In other words, the value of your account is what the brokerage house reports to you. That amount, up to $500,000, is what you could recover from the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, the SIPC, in the event of failure or fraud at the brokerage firm that has your money. More in the Waco Tribune here.