There are two issues which are the focus for today’s post, and both have been covered on separate occasions before here in Financial Regulation Matters . In February we discussed how the stated aims of President Trump, namely to ‘ drain the swamp ’ with regards to lobbying influence in Washington, D.C., were immediately proven to be nothing more than lip-service with the introduction of an Executive Order that preserved the ability of Congressional and White-House Officials to lobby after their term has expired. Then, in June, we discussed how large investors and other financial organisations were beginning to develop a societally-focused approach to their business, which translated into a reduction in investment in companies that profit from providing social ills, like tobacco companies. In today’s post we will look at an article that was published in The Guardian that discusses the actualities of the lobbying environment since Trump took office, with particular attention paid t...

During the last few days, leading members of the largest American bank, JPMorgan Chase, have been making a number of statements that hint towards a change in regulatory sentiment being very close indeed. Although President Trump’s attempting axing of a number of elements of the Dodd-Frank Act has already been discussed in Financial Regulation Matters , the largely ineffective executive order, which admittedly just called for review, is merely an indicator for a sea-change in sentiment. That change can be predicted by reading the words, and moreover the confidence of business elites, and in today’s short post the focus will be JPMorgan Chase. What we will see is that the levels of confidence being displayed, namely that the bank members themselves feel comfortable in lobbying for deregulation rather than paying lobbyists to do it for them, is an incredible and potentially positive development, for one counterintuitive reason. The two biggest indicators of JPMorgan Chase’s height...