A decade ago Northeast Ohioans saw themselves spiraling down the housing market crash that led us into the Great Recession. Now, some people are concerned an executive order signed by President Trump will put us back on that path.
In front of a packed crowd at the quicken loans arena, Donald Trump Jr. set the stage for rewriting Obama-era financial regulations. “The other party gave us a regulatory state on steroids," said Trump Jr.
The President's eldest taking aim at the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. "Dodd-Frank was a thousand pages long and has already spun off 22,000 pages in regulations" said Trump Jr.
Trump himself has referred to the law as a 'disaster' and through a pair of executive order last week began to ease banking regulations.
"I am already afraid because none of the folks on Wall Street who were responsible for creating this housing bubble, for allowing thousands of Ohioans to be foreclosed on, none of them went to jail" said Former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann.
Dann was in office during the height of the recession. "The foreclosure rate in northeast Ohio overnight went from .02 percent to almost 25%" said Dann. Dann says deregulating the banking industry will bring back predatory practices. "The folks on wall street benefit, exactly the folks it seems like Trump was campaigning against when he was running for president, the folks who run the big banks in the country."
Trump, however, says his goal is to ease constraints, so banks can lend more to businesses. "the banks would probably have a lower bar, which would allow them to lend easier to small companies who need money for a new plant" said Gregg LaBar, managing director at Dix and Eaton.
LaBar works closely with business out of Northeast Ohio, he says for companies, deregulating the industry is a double edged sword. "It may be more onerous than the benefit that is being provided because it created a whole new bureaucracy" said LaBar.
But LaBar says it did create more transparency within companies, which he believes will continue. "There probably are going to be major changes, but they are not going to repeal all 400 regulations" said LaBar.
