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HARRIS TRUST AND SAV. BANK Opinion of the Court
ervation of the business of insurance to the States." Brief
for Petitioner 31; see Metropolitan Life, 471 U. S., at 744, n. 21 (saving clause "appears to have been designed to preserve the McCarran-Ferguson Act's reservation of the business of insurance to the States"; saving clause and McCarran-Ferguson Act "serve the same federal policy and utilize similar language"). As the United States recognizes, "dual regulation under ERISA and state law is not an impossibility[;] [m]any requirements are complementary, and in the case of a direct conflict, federal supremacy principles require that state law yield." Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 23, n. 13.10
In resisting the argument that, with respect to general account contracts, state law, not federal law, is preemptive, we are mindful that Congress had before it, but failed to pass, just such a scheme. The Senate's proposed version of ERISA would have excluded all general account assets from the reach of the fiduciary rules.11 Instead of enacting the
10 See Chicago Bd. Options Exchange, Inc. v. Connecticut General Life Ins. Co., 713 F. 2d 254, 260 (CA7 1983) ("That ERISA does not relieve insurance companies of the onus of state regulation does not mean that Congress intended ERISA not to apply to insurance companies. Had that been Congress' intent . . . ERISA would have directly stated that it was pre-empted by state insurance laws."); 722 F. Supp. 998, 1004 (SDNY 1989) ("dual regulation comports with the language of the preemption and saving clauses, . . . which save certain state statutes from preemption, but which also assume that ERISA applies ab initio").
11 The Senate version of ERISA originally defined an "employee benefit fund" to exclude "premium[s], subscription charges, or deposits received and retained by an insurance carrier . . . except for any separate account established or maintained by an insurance carrier," and defined a fiduciary as "any person who exercises any power of control, management, or disposition with respect to any moneys or other property of any employee benefit fund . . . ." See S. 4, 93d Cong., 1st Sess., §§ 502(17)(B), (25), reprinted in Subcommittee on Labor of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, 94th Cong., 2d Sess., Legislative History of ERISA 147, 150 (Comm. Print 1976). After an amendment (Amdt. No. 496, Sept. 17, 1973), the provision regarding "Fiduciary Standards" was streamlined to exclude
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