Director John Moses: Investing Starts with Education

**John Moses** (0:00)
Investing is for everyone or almost everyone. It is about, the American Dream is about increasing what we own as individuals to support ourselves and our families. There's a lot of complicated questions, a lot of things to consider. We want to arm people with the resources to do it in an informed way.

**Paul Atkins** (0:15)
Thanks to the President's Initiative, a new development are the Trump accounts.

**John Moses** (0:19)
This idea of every child's first financial account being an investment account, it's really a big change in how we think about money.

**Paul Atkins** (0:29)
I think it has the prospect of really changing lives.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Material Matters. Today, it's my great pleasure to sit down with John Moses, the SEC's Director of Office of Investor Education and Assistance. While not always making headlines, the Office of Investor Education and Assistance plays an invaluable role in fulfilling our mission here at the SEC.
By providing Americans with education resources and financial planning tools, John's office works every day to help Americans invest wisely, avoid fraud, and lay the foundation for a secure financial future. So today, we are going to discuss the work that the office is doing towards that end and much more. So let's get started. So, John, thanks for doing so much for American investors and for being here to discuss this.

**John Moses** (1:38)
Well, it's a pleasure to be with you, Chairman Atkins, and it's an honor to help lead this team on the SEC's behalf.

**Paul Atkins** (1:47)
Well, you know, it's interesting.
The US now has and has for a while had the world's largest capital markets, and we're fully half of the global capitalization in our markets. And obviously, there are investors that are participating in markets from around the world. And whenever I go abroad in Japan or the UK or the European Union, my counterparts over there basically just say, well, how can we replicate this investment attitude, the ethos for investing, risk-taking, that Americans exemplify? And they talk about doing it from the top down. We have to have this, that, now they're to try to track them. But my argument is always you have to do it from the bottom up. The investors have to be interested in taking a risk to make investments. And so how do you approach that? And maybe you could just cover what your office is doing and how you address these sorts of issues.

**John Moses** (2:57)
Yeah, I think it's a good point. We have an opinion at our office. And I think it is something we feel here at the SEC throughout that investing is for everyone or almost everyone as part of their financial planning and their financial journey. It is more accessible than it's been ever before. And we have all kinds of innovations and marketplace developments, I think, to thank for that. In addition to a situation where we have people responsible for more and more of their long term expenses. So whether that's retirement or education or just saving up to buy a home. And there's a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and interest in personal finance.
More and more, we think that that enthusiasm and interest goes towards investing. A lot of what we see in personal finance might be about debt reduction, which is obviously really important, or about, you know, increasing one's salary, which is important. So what we earn and what we owe, our office and the SEC really is about what we own. And, you know, it's as we think about America 250 more and more, it is about the American dream is about increasing what we own as individuals to support ourselves and our families. In terms of our office, maybe I would start with the work that we do and on the investor assistance side, because I just mentioned this enthusiasm for investing. But there's a lot of complicated questions, a lot of things to consider. And our investor assistance team does a great job trying to support people when they have questions. So any American investor can go to help.sec.gov, send in a question or a problem that they might be having. And a member of our team will respond to them and help them figure out their question. It might be they're trying to find an old 401k or they don't understand a certain product.
And we can help them connect with the right resources. Of course, we can't give investment advice, but we can help them navigate definitions and navigate problems that they might be having with their accounts or their financial services professionals. So the assistance team, I think, is a really big part of what we do, and it helps give the thousands of people that contact us every year the confidence that they're on the right track.