Dodd-Frank Do-Over a Win for Banks: Trump Advisor Gary Cohn
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to scale back Dodd-Frank and dismantle much of the regulations rolled out in 2010 following the height of the financial crisis.
In a First on FOX Business interview with Maria Bartiromo, White House National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn said the first plan of action is to get U.S. banks lending again.
“The biggest thing we have to fix is that we have to get the United States banking system working again” Cohn said. “We need to get capital available to small and medium size businesses and for entrepreneurs. Today banks do not lend money to companies. Banks are forced to hoard money because they are force to hoard capital and they can’t take any risks. We need to get banks back in the lending business, that’s our number one objective.”
The directive on Dodd-Frank comes after Trump described the law as "a disaster” earlier this week during a meeting with small business leaders. “It’s almost impossible right now to start a small business and it’s virtually impossible to expand your existing business because of regulations,” said President Trump.
Friday’s messaging on Dodd-Frank comes as top businesses leaders meet with the Trump team at the White House to implement a strategy to boost the economy and create jobs. Some of the CEOs in attendance are JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon (NYSE:JPM), Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX (NASDAQ:TSLA).
Meeting with biggest business leaders this morning. Good jobs are coming back to U.S., health care and tax bills are being crafted NOW!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2017
Cohn expects to address three major issues during today’s meeting, regulation, tax reform and infrastructure, all of which prohibit businesses from growing at quicker pace. He also wants to clear up some parts of Obamacare and he is working on expediting tax reform.
“We are all working to a very common objective and everyone agrees what the objective is, the objective is lower corporate taxes as a starting point and then dealing with personal income taxes especially for the lower earners,” he said stressing that the United States must become competitive with the rest of the world on taxes. “We are spending an enormous amount of time trying to drive down corporate taxes and every one of these CEOs we have met with, as I said, it’s been their second most important topic, is the tax rate - making America competitive in tax rate.”