In his second week in office, Donald Trump huddled at the White House with a group of leading Wall Street executives. Their goal: to unravel Dodd-Frank, the law passed in the wake of the global financial crisis to curb some of Wall Street's most predatory practices. In front of assembled press, Trump pointed to Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, which had been forced by the Justice Department to pay a record $13 billion in 2013 for misleading investors about toxic securities. “There's nobody better to tell me about Dodd-Frank than Jamie,” Trump declared. “We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank.”
That afternoon, Trump signed a pair of executive orders that pave the way for rolling back many of Dodd-Frank's financial reforms. It was not just a gift to “friends of mine,” as the president put it—people, he said, with “nice businesses.” It was also the opening salvo in a full-fledged war to destroy the law's most high-profile and effective creation: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
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