Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Treasury Department said Wednesday that major changes are in store for the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law.
Steve Mnuchin, a Goldman Sachs executive who the president-elect tapped this week as his pick for Treasury secretary, said in a interview that the incoming administration hopes to gut the bill’s lending provisions that he said had harmed small- and mid-sized businesses.
“The number one problem with Dodd-Frank is it’s way too complicated and it cuts back lending, so we want to strip back parts of Dodd-Frank that prevent banks from lending and that will be the number one priority on the regulatory side,” Mnuchin said Tuesday on CNBC. “The number one priority is going to be making sure that banks lend.”
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, signed into law in 2010 in the most significant overhaul of financial regulation in the United States since the Great Depression, consolidated regulatory agencies and created new oversight councils to “evaluate systemic risk.”
Conservative critics have complained that the new regulations, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, have stifled economic growth and unfairly burdened financial institutions, though Mnuchin didn’t specifically address those aspects of the law. Instead, he said the new Trump Treasury team would work to loosen the rules that have restricted lending to small businesses.
“We’ve been in the business of regional banking and we understand what it is to make loans,” he said. “That’s the engine of growth to small- and medium-sized businesses.”
