Wall Street is a veritable flood of Dom Perignon and Cristal as the banksters celebrate the unlikely win of Donald Trump. Every day is going to be Christmas for these guys now, as long as Republicans also hold Congress. They are positively giddy as they see their own likely to be elevated in the administration, and anticipate their free rein to steal as they please (while wrecking life for the rest of us).
A populist candidate who railed against shady financial interests on the campaign trail is now putting together an administration that looks like an investment banker's dream. […]
Evidence of Wall Street’s improved prospects is everywhere.
The Dodd-Frank financial reform law that bedeviled the industry for years and cost banks untold billions could soon get burned to the ground. Bank stocks are soaring. Trump is going around Manhattan promising to lower rich people’s taxes. And industry critics led by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — long in ascendance — are seeing their populist power deflate.
The anti-banker culture of Washington has been turned on its head in an instant. And the industry can barely believe its good fortune. “Those of us who have been around D.C. for a long time, are we relieved that we are not going to be subpoenaed every week? Of course we are,” said Richard Hunt, head of the Consumer Bankers Association.
Yeah, irony. Trump won by telling the common man life was going to be so good for him in an America made great again, all the while planning to put the banksters in charge of his economic team.
Bank stocks are way up and these already filthy rich guys are already counting on the massive tax cuts that will be coming their way.
One Goldman Sachs executive told Politico (anonymously, so at least he's slightly embarrassed about all this), that there's "a joke going around here that if I’d have known how good Trump was going to be for Wall Street, I’d have campaigned for him. […] People thought it might be 10 or 15 years until regulators stopped demanding heads and now all of a sudden you can envision it happening overnight."
As Politico reports, the "possible exit of Chair Janet Yellen and Vice Chair Stanley Fischer" will happen within the year, and Trump will almost certainly replace them with "candidates less inclined to hold banks to high capital requirements and otherwise rein in their activities." All of which spells—they believe—the end to Dodd-Frank and the slim reeds of protection it provides to prevent another global economic meltdown like the one President Obama worked eight long years to pull us out of.
So here we go again.