Donald Trump remained relatively silent on financial regulation during his presidential campaign but past interviews reviewed by CNN's KFile show his support for deregulating the financial industry and reveal how a Trump administration may deal with Wall Street.
In the days after Trump's victory, the Dow Jones Industrial Average unexpectedly soared to record highs. On the campaign trail, the president-elect has promised to repeal the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that imposed regulations on the financial industry in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but did little to tip his hand on how he would approach financial regulation as a whole.
In interviews with Fox News and CNBC in 2011 and 2012, Trump expressed his deep disbelief in the effectiveness of regulations in general.
"I think regulation, all it does is make a bad banker probably worse, if you think about it," Trump said on Fox and Friends in May 2012. "I think the regulations are not good. Dodd-Frank stops — you try and go out if you're starting a business, you try and go to a bank and get money, they're afraid to loan it."
"They'll always talk about 'regulators, oh the regulators, they're watching.' Well, what are they watching? They're watching job creation," continued Trump. "If you have a lot of money, and you want to borrow money, you can borrow money, but you don't need the money. You can only borrow money today if you don't need the money. If you need money, and you want to build a business, and obviously there's risk, you can't borrow money at any rate."
In an interview with Fox News's "O'Reilly Factor" in April of 2011, Trump said regulations were making it tough to compete with the rest of the world.
"One of the reasons the recession hit us so hard is because weasels on Wall Street ginned up these real estate derivatives," asked host Bill O'Reilly. " You're a real estate guy. Would you crack down on Wall Street? Would you have more regulations on these people? More rules they have to follow over there?"
"I would not do that," Trump responded. "You're making it so tough for our companies and our Wall Street people -- let's use the word nicely -- our Wall Street people to compete with the rest of the world, because you have guys in London, guys in Switzerland, guys in Hong Kong that are giving very, very good deals, and they don't have the kind of regulation that we have here. I'm not a big regulation person. People find their ways around regulation very easily. These are super geniuses."
Speaking with CNBC in May of 2012 about J.P. Morgan Chase's massive 2012 trading loss due to the so-called London Whale, which led to criticism of the bank's internal controls and CEO James Dimon being dragged before Congress, Trump said the country's current "tremendous regulation" showed how regulation did not work.
"In theory we have tremendous regulation, probably more than any other country in the world as far as banking is concerned, and it didn't stop this $2 billion loss. Frankly, even before Dodd-Frank or any of the other various legislative mandates a long time ago. If you remember, only four years ago, there was plenty of legislation out there also. They've added to it and they've added to it in spades in you still had this. Now, they're talking about making more legislation. All that's going to do is stop people from making loans."
And, in March 2011, in an interview with CNBC host Larry Kudlow, Trump said the US needed to take away rules and regulations to make the country competitive.
"We have to take away some rules and regulations," stated Trump, saying friends who run big companies were afraid of being arrested for making the wrong decision.
