With the possibility that Donald Trump isn't going to be in office in January 2021, it seems that the Republican powers that be have decided they've got to get serious about stealing everything while they still can. Mitch McConnell has taken care of that with the federal judiciary. Big oil is taken care of at the EPA and Interior with their lapdogs installed. Of course, Wall Street wasn't going to miss out on a fire sale, so they got theirs, too. Federal regulators have approved an easing of the Volcker Rule, introduced after the last time Wall Street tried to destroy the global economy to make banks operate just a little bit more safely.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law included the rule to prevent institutions that are protected by the taxpayer-insured FDIC from making certain kinds of speculative investments that do not benefit their customers and limits their dealings with hedge funds and private equity funds. It prohibits banks from using the federally insured accounts to invest in short-term proprietary trading of securities, derivatives, and commodity futures. It was a partial restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which divided commercial banking and investment banking. To simplify a complex issue, basically rampant speculation in mortgage-based derivatives was what brought on the great recession, the kind of crisis the Dodd-Frank reforms were intended to prevent.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) have decided to give "Wall Street one of its biggest wins under the Trump administration," with all of the Republican FCIC members voting in favor. The one Democratic commissioner, Martin Gruenberg, voted against the rule change, saying it would "effectively undo" the protections in the rule. Sen. Sherrod Brown, the ranking Democrat on the Banking Committee agreed."Trump regulators continue to open a Pandora’s box of risky trading and speculation at the expense of American taxpayers," he said in a statement released after the rule change was approved.
With 74% of economists predicting another recession in the next two years, the timing of this rule couldn't be more frightening for everyone who lived through the last one, the great one. Which is pretty much all of us.