Treats for the rich
Two weeks in, and the greedy lying corrupt plutocrat wants to shred what financial regulations we have. Bernie Madoff was framed! Let’s have more and bigger recessions! Let’s see if we can top the Great Depression!
President Trump mounted an all-out assault on financial regulation on Friday, announcing an array of steps to tear down safeguards enacted to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis and turning to the Wall Street titans he had demonized during his campaign for advice.
After a White House meeting with the business executives on Friday, Mr. Trump signed a directive calling for a rewriting of major provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, crafted by the Obama administration and passed by Congress in response to the 2008 meltdown, the White House said. A second directive he signed is expected to halt and possibly require an overhaul of an Obama-era Labor Department rule that requires brokers to act in a client’s best interest, rather than seek the highest profits for themselves, when providing retirement advice.
Because why shouldn’t brokers fuck over their clients if doing so will make the brokers richer? This is America, god damn it. It’s only those stinking coastal elites who think brokers should work for their clients rather than for themselves; the good salt of the earth people in flyover country know better. Power to the people. Drain the swamp.
Taken together, the actions constitute a broad effort to loosen regulations on banks and other major financial companies, put into motion by a president who campaigned as a champion of working Americans and a harsh critic of global elites. Those elites include Wall Street companies like Goldman Sachs, whose alumni now populate his Cabinet and economic advisory teams.
No he’s still totally a champion of working Americans. Brokers are working Americans!
“We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank because frankly, I have so many people, friends of mine that had nice businesses, they can’t borrow money,” Mr. Trump said in the State Dining Room during his meeting with business leaders. “They just can’t get any money because the banks just won’t let them borrow it because of the rules and regulations in Dodd-Frank.”
Well that’s just awful. Trump’s friends should totally be able to take out risky loans, the feds can just step in when the loans go bad, and everything will be fine.
People who lose their jobs and can’t pay their rent, on the other hand, should be evicted without delay.
The president had praise for Jamie Dimon, whose bank, JPMorgan Chase, was often a target of regulatory actions by the Obama administration.
“There’s nobody better to tell me about Dodd-Frank than Jamie, so you’re going to tell me about it,” Mr. Trump said.
The meeting underscored the degree to which the architects of Mr. Trump’s economic strategy are now some of the very people he lambasted in his campaign, which ended with a commercial that described “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations.”
Funnily enough, he never meant a word of that, and funnily enough, it was always obvious that he never meant a word of it. Isn’t life a hoot.
While the president cannot unwind Dodd-Frank with the stroke of a pen, his orders set the tone for the regulatory agencies enforcing the rules, including the Securities and Exchange Commission. And the orders, which Democrats and consumer groups immediately denounced as gifts to the Wall Street companies that ignited the 2008 crisis, could portend even more executive actions that direct the regulators to halt financial regulation.
The actions are the latest sign that Mr. Trump, despite striking a populist tone during the campaign, is working to accommodate Wall Street and other corporations.
Of course he is. He fooled people. He’s a shameless misogynist racist who loves to shout about “political correctness” – but that’s not actually the same thing as being on the side of the working class, however much some working class people may love complaints about “political correctness.”
Following the new president’s lead, congressional Republicans on Friday started chipping away at Dodd-Frank, one of Mr. Obama’s signature achievements. The Republicans used an unusual parliamentary procedure to repeal a rule that stems from the law with only a majority of votes rather than the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
The Senate voted 52 to 47 to void the rule, which requires oil companies to publicly disclose payments they make to governments when developing resources around the world. The rule, which Dodd-Frank assigned to the Securities and Exchange Commission to enforce, was tangential to Dodd-Frank’s mission of reforming Wall Street, but lawmakers included it anyway with the hope of exposing bribes and corruption.
The swamp rises.
Who are these Trump “friends” who can’t get loans from American banks? Just asking for a friend.
By contrast, post 2008, when our financial advice industry was a sewer, we’ve undergone huge reform resulting in hundreds of poorly qualified financial advisers leaving the industry and the greedy and incompetent businesses closing down (those that didn’t fail anyway).
A statutory Code of Conduct has been established, item 1 of which is to place the interests of the client first at all times and before considering any other matters. Then there’s lots of stuff about disclosure, not being misleading, meeting minimum standards etc etc.
Sam, almost certainly dodgy property. Developers using other people’s money. When they fail, as they often do, other people take the loss. When they succeed, they gain almost all the profit. We saw lots of this behaviour in the build up to, and aftermath of, the GFC. Lots of dodgy and outright illegal behaviour, huge related party loans, meaningless personal Garuntees etc. A real sewer.
Well let’s hope there’s enough interest to stop bailouts this time. These banks need to fail.
BKiSA,@4
The principle of private profits and public losses will prevail, the banks will not be allowed to fail. The social and political losses would be insupportable for any government, right, left or centre. So the taxpayers will pay the bill when Trump’s deregulation mania leads to another recession.
Remember the observation—– “When someone owes you $1000 they’re in your hands, when someone owes $1,000,000 you’re in their hands”
Class consciousness seems to have evaporated in the US and other Western nations. How could working class people believe that a zillionaire plutocrat would represent their interests in government? It’s amazing. Trump is the enemy.
Because he was a white male, and an outsider who knew nothing about Washington. The shouting about the need for outsiders to run things (preferably like a business, which is geared toward maximizing profits for those who run it) has crescendoed for years now, and this is the culmination of a plan to use the so-called democratic system to turn this country into a for-profit enterprise, with the profit going to those who were clever enough to be born into the right family (and right sex, and right color skin).
Rob, in other words, Trump himself. The guy who had to be bailed out with Russian mob money and loans from foreign banks.
iknklast,
Well, let’s hope that the plebs get the message sooner or later. Despite those cherished myths, the US already has a relatively low measure of social mobility and a high degree of inequality compared to other developed nations.
Sam, hmmmmm
Class consciousness has been “un-American” since early in the Cold War – some sort of Commie plot. Instead, we’ve had ideological and race consciousness as mainstream, normal, familiar, unexceptional. Any time something rings a little like a class issue, it will either get squelched in popular political discussion, or it will morph into a race/religion/cultural issue.
Manufacturing jobs disappearing? Talk about technological changes won’t get far except among wonks; calls for retraining programs will draw complaints about the “nanny state”; suggestions that the profit-seeking behavior of corporations is an issue will be condemned. But if you can blame it on the differently-complected foreigners, you’ve got a hot-button issue to get you deep into presidential campaigns; if you can suggest that a conspiracy of coastal elites is screwing “real” Americans in favor of their beloved non-Christians across oceans, well, your campaign is set.
Worried about mortgages being in the same hands as financial casino operations? It’s all about growth, see, and job creation, and keeping government’s hands out of your pockets. (And if it makes no sense, well, it only has to fill a sound bite – most voters are too tired from the jobs those creators stick them with to think that hard.)
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