What The Hell America!

Steering the country toward another potential financial crisis, the Trump administration has moved to completely gut the federal regulatory agency tasked with reining in the very financial institutions currently making the president’s allies rich.

The president’s attacks on the government’s financial regulator are a stunning about-face from 2016, when Trump first campaigned on reinstating tough banking regulations.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was established in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse to protect Americans from abusive lending practices, supervise new financial products, and shore up the nation’s economic system.

During the Biden administration, the CFPB cracked down on junk fees, expanded its scope to include fintech and digital payments, investigated crypto firms for fraud and money laundering, and refunded more than $21 billion to defrauded consumers.

But last week, CFPB acting director Russell Vought announced the agency would be “shifting resources away from enforcement and supervision” and “deprioritizing” certain regulatory work it believes should be left to the states. The administration also tried to lay off nearly 90 percent of the CFPB’s staff, but was put on hold by a federal judge who said she was “deeply concerned” about the plan to summarily fire 1,500 of the bureau’s employees.

Trump is following in former president Bill Clinton’s footsteps, who first moved to substantially deregulate Wall Street in 1999. That year, Clinton passed the Financial Services Modernization Act, which allowed banks to integrate their services, invest in each other, and consolidate. Clinton also overturned the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that prohibited banks from combining their commercial and investment banking activities. The result made big banks even bigger and may have helped cause the 2008 financial collapse.

Last week’s memo goes even further, spelling out the agency’s plans to refocus regulatory efforts on “depository institutions” like banks, “as opposed to non-depository institutions” like fintech and cryptocurrency firms.

This is welcome news for the cryptocurrency industry, which poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s candidacy and inaugural celebrations. That includes some of Trump’s most powerful tech allies, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Gemini CEO Tyler Winklevoss, who both had Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuits against their crypto trading platforms dropped by the Trump administration and have openly cheered on the dismantling of the CFPB.

“The CFPB is unconstitutional on the face of it. And even if it wasn’t, it should be deleted as we already have [the Department of Justice] to prosecute fraud, and many other financial services regulators. It’s an activist organization that has done enormous harm to the country,” Armstrong wrote on Twitter/X in February.

This comes even as financial regulators warn that the explosion of crypto in traditional financial markets and government reserves could cause a financial collapse.

Other non-depository institutions tagged for deprioritization in Vought’s memo include online payment and lending platforms. With nearly 40 percent market share in the digital payment processing industry, PayPal stands to substantially benefit from deregulation — especially since it has been fined millions for bad behavior by the CFPB. The company donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration, and its biggest backers, Vanguard Group and BlackRock, bought large positions in Trump’s media company last fall.

Venture capitalist and billionaire Trump donor Marc Andreessen, whose investment firm infamously bankrolled the failed fintech firm Synapse, recently told podcaster Joe Rogan the CFPB “terrorizes . . . anyone who wants to do anything new in financial services.” But the United States has already seen the terror that can be unleashed when the financial industry is left to its own devices. Now that the CFPB has been kneecapped, and industry-backed members of Congress refuse to regulate crypto and fintech, 2008 doesn’t feel so far away.