President Donald Trump's assault on regulations designed to keep Wall Street in check is going quite well, as a check on the first quarter of his presidency has found that fines levied by government regulators has decreased substantially.
The U.S. has cut the amount of fines against institutions issued by two-thirds, compared to last year. As the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, that would put it on track for a low not seen in seven years:
Penalties levied against firms and individuals by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in the first half of 2017 were down nearly two-thirds compared with the first half of 2016—putting regulators on track for the lowest annual level of fines since at least 2010, the Journal found. Fines of $489 million in the first half of 2017 compared with $1.4 billion in the 2016 period.
The SEC levied some $318 million in penalties during the first half of 2017, a search of federal court documents and all publicly available records on the agency’s website and data provided by Andrew N. Vollmer, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, showed. Last year, agency actions yielded $750 million in penalties during the same period, an agency spokesman said. The SEC declined to disclose its own tally of 2017 penalties; the agency didn’t dispute that the total value of penalties fell in the first half of 2017 compared with the same term in 2016.
Agency officials were quick to point out that a six-month sample shouldn't be considered indicative of the government's regulatory mechanisms — the WSJ pointed to large payouts in two major cases that accounted for a large portion of the $1.4 billion mark in 2016.
Wall Street lobbyists have also been pushing the administration to "lower the size of financial penalties," the Journal said. And as regulators expect Trump to continue with a "business-friendly" approach, increased oversight doesn't look likely in the future.
If being lax about enforcing the laws isn't enough, the administration has been pushing for businesses to be writing them, too. According to McClatchy, business executives have been working in secret "advisory groups" that haven't been disclosing what they've been working on.
Can't enforce the laws if there are no laws to enforce.
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