Investor Protection Trust Considers Education Program

Financial stewards overseeing the trust funded by large settlements against Wall Street firms are eyeing a new plan to launch complimentary financial courses for individual investors on a nationwide basis, Dow Jones Newswires reports.
Don Blandin, the newly appointed chief executive of the Investor Protection Trust, said he acknowledges the need to bolster investor education as a means of protecting consumers and is considering various strategies for deploying free finance courses. The fund was started in 1993 with $27.5 million of regulatory fines levied against Salomon Brothers and has since been sweetened by part of the recent $1.4 billion settlement punishing six large Wall Street firms for issuing tainted research.
Blandin, who also called printed literature a poor substitute for face-to-face educational settings, is also studying the feasibility of a financial educational corps, loosely dubbed The Society of Accredited Financial Educators, or SAFE. One variation of Blandin's plan calls for a volunteer army of educators, presumably like a financial peace corps, to promote financial awareness.

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