Oh Yeah, and They’re Letting Wall Street Go Nuts Again
Photo by Mark Wilson
Maybe you remember this scene early on in Arrested Development’s first season. Michael Bluth opens his refrigerator, finds a bag marked “Dead Dove, Do Not Eat!”, opens it, flinches and says, “Well, I don’t know what I expected.” When I read about President Trump’s first move to rip Dodd-Frank and other financial crisis legislation to shreds, I reacted the same way.
The president exists in a weird plane of reality. Each new insane action of his is equally shocking and unsurprising. He is the dove in Michael Bluth’s bag: a promise too absurd to be kept being kept. Trump’s brown-paper bag would probably be labeled: Crazy, Corrupt Billionaire, Do Not Elect. In these last few weeks, we’ve all been so caught up in his craziness that it’s been a little harder to pay attention to his corruption.
Most of the headlines on this “Dodd-Frank” order are clickbait. When I read the actual text, it was a letdown. For a predictably chaotic person, his actions here were unpredictably mundane. The order in question is a paper tiger and a defanged one at that. After outlining several of the most benign and innocuous regulatory ideas anyone with a brainstem could dream up, all he really requests is a report from the Secretary of the Treasury as to how we can better proceed in the future.
The order itself is something you would see coming out of the Oval Office no matter who was our President or Secretary of the Treasury. The issue is, of course, Donald Trump is the President and Steven Mnuchin is the Secretary of the Treasury. That makes all the difference in the world.
Trump spent a decent amount of time on the campaign trail trying out a Diet Bernie Sanders impersonation when it came to Wall Street. His own rhetoric was never quite as damning but, especially early on, he tapped into the rage left over from the bailouts and crises that ushered us into our current decade. Even now, it seems like the folks at our financial center have conflicting views on how Trump will turn out for them overall. He’s solicited a fair amount of praise and concern.