'Populist' Trump Punks His Credulous Fans | Crooks and Liars

'Populist' Trump Punks His Credulous Fans | Crooks and Liars

"Voters enchanted by Trump's promises may not have known that he owed his wealth and the continued existence of his business - despite multiple bankruptcies - to bankers at places like Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Deutsche Bank (and still owed them hundreds of millions of dollars). They probably didn't know how quickly he abandoned his bogus promise to fund his own campaign, turning to Steven Mnuchin, a Goldman Sachs veteran and predatory mortgage lender, to raise millions.  And they surely didn't know that Mnuchin openly boasted he would become Treasury Secretary, the very reward that Trump awarded him - or that various other Wall Street figures, from Commerce nominee Wilbur Ross to National Economic Council chief Gary Cohn, would dominate Trump's appointments. Now they do know - or they should, if they've been paying attention. But do they realize yet how badly Trump punked them? On Friday, he delivered a multi-billion dollar gift to Wall Street by eviscerating the Dodd-Frank financial regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 crash. One of his two executive orders instructed the Department of Labor to delay and ultimately destroy the fiduciary rule that required financial firms to offer advice only in their clients' best interest - rather than self-serving schemes for self-enrichment. With that single stroke he encouraged the banks to fleece working Americans of their retirement savings, with an implicit promise that the government will do nothing to stop or punish them. According to a report released last year by the Obama administration, the fiduciary rule would save Americans from $18 billion in financial cheating annually. Goldman Sachs estimated that the rule would cost financial firms as much as $25 billion per year. Either way, undoing the rule is an enormous favor to Wall Street - and a gigantic gouge of consumers."