Fiduciary Failings

Very good article from Ben Stein on Yahoo Finance:

2. By the same token, the investment advisors who guided billions into Madoff's phony accounts have to be held to account. They are required to behave according to fiduciary standards. That means they have to put the client's interest ahead of their own, do stringent investigation, and avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. Clearly, in many, many cases, none of these requirements were met.

I am going to start collecting references to failures of regulators and others entrusted with doing the right thing. Perhaps, one day we will realize that people are severely flawed and will see that "fiduciary responsibility" is as meaningless in practice as "next time we will try harder" or "this time it will be different".