‘A culture of fear’Trump has swung at Wall Street for
much of January in cobbling together an “affordability” agenda. Going after large banks and investment funds was partly self-serving: Public surveys showed Trump’s economic approval dipping ahead of the 2026 midterms, and Wall Street still presents a juicy political foil during election season.
The president put forward a proposal to bar large investment firms from snapping up single-family homes. Another sought to enact a one-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates, an idea first proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders. Dimon and Moynihan roundly criticized the latter as a threat to credit access for low-income Americans. They left out that it would be a big hit to bank profits too.
It proved a rare example of public dissent with Trump from Wall Street giants. A year of on-again, off-again trade wars and attacks on the Federal Reserve
hadn’t sparked major pushback. The Business Roundtable, for example, has opted for directly engaging key administration officials behind the scenes rather than take policy disagreements public.
Chief executives in finance, tech, and retail otherwise have mostly kept their heads down to avoid triggering Trump’s fury.
One testy exchange between Dimon and The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes at the WEF in Davos, Switzerland might have grabbed more attention if not for Trump’s mania for Greenland. Minton Beddoes pressed Dimon on whether “a culture of fear” gripped chief executives in the U.S.
Dimon was visibly
uncomfortable. He rattled off that he supported a stronger NATO military alliance, fewer tariffs, and wanted the Trump administration to dial back its hardline immigration crackdown. “I’ve said it, what the hell else do you want me to say?” he added, without ever actually answering the question.
Trump’s fight with Wall Street could have surprise winners in one sector: crypto. “There's this competitive edge that this sort of last approach to crypto regulation enforcement gives crypto over traditional finance,” Reilly
Steel, a finance professor at Columbia Law School, told Quartz Washington.
But it’d be a mistake to assume Wall Street hasn’t scored victories of its own. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau switched sides to kill its own rule last year imposing an $8 limit on credit card late fees. And White House
budget director Russ Vought is barreling ahead with shuttering the CFPB, long unpopular in the financial sector.
The CFPB has successfully returned $21 billion to consumers. The agency’s future, though, hangs on a federal court hearing next month. It has enough funding to remain open through March, even though it has virtually
abandoned enforcement actions.
For now, Wall Street executives are straining to put their best foot forward. “Our relationship with the administration is very, very good,” Solomon told Bloomberg News in an interview published Tuesday, adding “this administration is open for business and it’s engaged with
business.”
Without delving into specific events, Solomon cast the seismic geopolitical developments of the month as only “speed bumps” on the path to prosperity. “I think at the moment, generally, things look relatively green.”
— Joseph Zeballos-Roig
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