Danger: Financial Deregulation Is A Very Bad Idea (Forbes)

President Trump wants to weaken, if not eliminate, the Dodd-Frank Act; and he wants to remove the requirement that financial brokers act as fiduciaries when advising clients making investment decisions. These are bad ideas. To be fair, the plan will not harm everybody, just almost everybody; and they will help some, at least in the short run. If you want to understand who the losers and winners will be, ask yourself who were the winners and losers during the lead up to the global financial crisis, the crisis itself, and the fallout thereafter.

You know it's bad when Forbes is publishing op-eds against a "financial deregulation" idea. There are many articles making basically the same point (here's Bernie Sanders calling Trump a fraud/sell-out; here's the NY Times saying Trump has picked Wall Street over Main Street). We largely agree that dismantling the fiduciary rule is a dumb idea: it makes no sense to absolve investment advisors from fiduciary liability -- that's more like a legal immunity against responsibility than "deregulation". As for dismantling Dodd-Frank, a lot of good can be done going down that road (the law is more of a "do something, anything" reflexive reaction to the financial crisis of 2007/8 than anything actual productive.). E.g., we'd be amenable to higher reserve requirements, and eliminating as many aspects of government backing to banks as possible, rather than attempting to micromanage how banks' funds are invested.