American Bridge spokesperson Andrew Bates released the following statement after National Economic Council (NEC) Director Gary Cohn told the American Bankers Association – receiving applause – that the Trump Administration was working to diminish financial sector regulations put into place after the 2008 financial crisis: 

“At the very same time that Trump is pushing a tax plan that would give 80% of its benefits to the wealthiest Americans, his top economic adviser is being applauded by the banking lobby for promising to erode post-financial crisis Wall Street reforms.  The middle class and American workers need an advocate in the White House, but instead Donald Trump is trying to further rig the economy in favor of the richest taxpayers and expose the American people to a catastrophic repeat of the 2008 recession.”

WATCH:

American Bankers Association President and CEO Rob Nichols: Kind of a broader picture just about the overall tone of the supervisory regulatory architecture and then I’d like to go through and I’ll ask some questions, some legislative and regulatory and some other questions. Just trying to change the overall tone.

NEC Director Gary Cohn: Look, we are completely trying to change the tone. If you look at the Trump economic agenda, when we came out, we said, look, we’ve got a three-legged stool here to grow the economy. The first leg of the stool is reg reform. It’s not just financial services reg reform, but the biggest part of that leg is financial service reg reform. When we talk about financial service reg reform, it’s moving the pendulum that swung too far after the 2008 crisis back to the middle, allowing banks to be banks, allowing banks to get back in the business of taking in deposits and making loans in the way they think they should do it, not the way the government thinks they should do it.