Wall Street hope revived as Trump plans to roll back rules

Bloomberg

Just when Wall Street was starting to wonder whether President Donald Trump really would be good for business, the new administration is delivering on bankers’ wish lists and sending shares of the biggest US financial companies soaring.
Trump signed two directives aimed at starting the process of rolling back restrictions put in place to prevent another financial crisis. Among the targets are rules that guard against predatory lenders, force brokers to lower fees for retirees and ban proprietary trading—protections that consumer advocates vowed to defend. Chief executives including Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Lloyd Blankfein and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon have been pushing for changes for years, arguing that the industry has been too constrained by the system put in place by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. After Trump focused on limiting trade and immigration during his first two weeks in office—policies opposed by many in the financial industry—the president’s stroke of a pen unleashes a process to undo many of the rules they find most irksome.
“We’re going to attack all aspects of Dodd-Frank,” Gary Cohn, the director of the White House National Economic Council and former Goldman Sachs president, said Friday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. The administration “can do quite a bit” without help from lawmakers, Cohn said, “but the more help we get from Congress the better off we’re all going to be.” Getting Congress to pass changes to Dodd-Frank won’t be easy. Most legislation would require support from at least eight Democrats in the Senate to get around filibuster rules. Republicans could try to go after parts of the law through a process known as budget reconciliation that wouldn’t require a single Democratic vote, but that requires proving specific provisions of Dodd-Frank are a drain on the budget.