Today’s post reacts to the recent report put forward by the U.S. Department of the Treasury entitled ‘ A Financial System That Creates Economic Opportunities: Banks and Credit Unions ’, which represents the aim of the Trump Administration to ‘ do a big number on Dodd-Frank ’. The headline effect of the report, namely the proposed circumvention of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on the basis that ‘ the CFPB’s approach to enforcement and rulemaking has hindered consumer choice and access to credit, limited innovation, and imposed undue compliance burdens ’, will no doubt be the key issue with regards to the fallout of this contentious report. For this post, we will assess the report and the underlying sentiment, and then position this understanding within a wider picture of the ‘amnesia’ that is taking hold despite a number of globalised warnings regarding the ability of the system to withstand any more shocks so close to the last Crisis. The Treasury report is th...

It was reported yesterday (3/2/2017) in the Guardian Newspaper that the newly-elected U.S. President, Donald Trump, had ‘moved to roll back the financial regulations brought in after the last financial crisis’ [1] . Those regulations came in the form of the sweeping Dodd-Frank Wall St. Reform and Consumer Protection Act 2010 , and whilst the President’s orders do not signal the repeal of the Act (only Congress can repeal the Act), the order does represent an alarming sentiment. The campaign of Donald Trump was defined by sensationalist rhetoric, on both sides of the U.S. political divide, so it is wise not to contribute to that. However, the report yesterday contains two extremely worrying elements that must be considered; the severity of both can be understood when we look at the development after the last great collapse of the U.S. economy – the Great Depression. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, the U.S. Administration of Roosevelt initiated the ‘New-Deal Era’ which o...