The best advice you can give your 401(k) or 403(b) plan participants about their retirement accounts is to avoid any conflicts, according to an advisory board of investment advisers from the American Investment Association.
The board, made up of about 200 of the nation’s largest private-equity firms, is part of the investment advisory firm Morgan Stanley and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
The group’s board, which advises clients on investing strategies, has been a fixture of Wall Street for decades.
The advisory board members serve on the investment panel of the Federal Open Market Committee, a group of central banks that makes decisions that affect the nation and its economy.
The Federal Reserve has made the investment advisers part of its public relations team.
“It’s not a secret that the Fed is a huge fan of the advisory boards,” said Daniel S. Rothstein, chief executive of Rothstein Wealth Advisors, a New York-based private-label private-sector asset management firm.
The financial industry’s public relations firm, Public Affairs Strategies, also has a history of providing advice to the Fed.
The public relations work of the Fed has been “a tremendous asset to the country,” said Rothstein.
In its 2014 Annual Report, the Fed noted that “the advisory boards of public companies often serve as a resource to policymakers, industry, and other stakeholders to identify, assess, and propose solutions to policy issues.” “
This is a really good example of how it’s done,” he added.
In its 2014 Annual Report, the Fed noted that “the advisory boards of public companies often serve as a resource to policymakers, industry, and other stakeholders to identify, assess, and propose solutions to policy issues.”
It said it uses the advisory panels for these purposes to inform policymaking.
It added that the advisory-board work has been instrumental in identifying and identifying the most effective approaches to managing the risks associated with financial crises.
“The Advisory Board’s contribution to the public discourse has been crucial in helping us understand and communicate the Fed’s views on a range of complex economic and financial issues,” the report said.
The Fed advisory panel has received bipartisan support, according of the annual report.
The majority of the group’s members are former top Fed officials and former Federal Reserve Board members, including former Chairman Ben Bernanke.
The most senior members of the board are also members of prominent financial firms, including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and the investment firm, BlackRock.
The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Bernanke, who left the Fed in 2009, received a $25,000 annual compensation package from Morgan Stanley.
The Journal cited a Fed official as saying the board’s members receive “generally well-paid and generous benefits.”
Bernanke did not respond to a request for comment from the Journal.
In response to questions from the WSJ, Morgan Stanley said that it “has always provided financial services to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and that we are a long-standing member of the FDIC advisory board.”
Bern, who served as chairman of the bank’s investment advisory committee until 2014, said in an interview with Bloomberg News last month that the bank “isn’t involved in advising the Fed on investment decisions.”
In 2014, the bank also told investors that it has a policy of not “advising” on financial issues and said that the firm “has no direct investment in the policies of other private-investment funds, except to the extent that it advises on matters of public policy.”
A spokesman for the bank declined to comment on the latest Wall Street reports.
A statement from the Fed advisory board did not address the latest criticism about its influence.
It also declined to answer a question from Bloomberg about whether the advisory group’s advisory work has influenced policymaking at the Fed, which has faced criticism in recent months for failing to act on the crisis of the housing market.
