President Trump on Friday is expected to sign executive orders rolling back parts of former President Obama’s 2010 Wall Street reform law, and halting a rule finalized last year that cracks down on conflicts of interest in retirement financial advising.
Trump is expected to sign the orders at noon, but reporters were given a preview of the sweeping measures Thursday evening.
One executive order would ask for a review of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which instituted a host of new restrictions on banks and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“Americans are going to have better choices and Americans are going to have better products because we’re not going to burden the banks with literally hundreds of billions of dollars of regulatory costs every year,” Trump National Economic Council head Gary Cohn, formerly the president of Goldman Sachs, told the Wall Street Journal.
Few specifics were available about how regulators were to reshape the sprawling law. The administration appears ready, however, to replace the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an Obama holdover with a term running into 2018. That step would invite a legal battle with the bureau’s defenders.
Another executive order would halt the implementation of the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, which requires that brokers and other advisers who work with tax-privileged retirement plans act in their clients’ best interests. The Obama administration finalized the rule last year to prevent advisers from steering clients into high-fee financial products for which the advisers got kickbacks.
Republicans, however, have argued that the rule will raise the cost of retirement advice and make it so that many savers are unable to access professional investment advice.
Trump’s choice for secretary of the Department of Labor, fast food CEO Andy Puzder, has not yet been confirmed by the Senate.
