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Trump Admin Readies Big Gift for Wall Street While Waging War, Gutting Aid Programs
“At a time of extreme and growing inequality," said one critic, "today’s proposals will drain lending away from Main Street families’ needs and priorities and further enrich the already wealthy on Wall Street."
Mar 19, 2026
The Trump administration and Federal Reserve unveiled proposals Thursday that would significantly reduce capital requirements for the largest banks in the United States, potentially setting the stage for another financial industry collapse as the US-Israeli war on Iran destabilizes the global economy and jacks up prices for consumers.
Under the new rules proposed by the Fed, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, large banks would have to hold nearly 5% less capital on average. The advocacy organization Better Markets noted that the proposals—combined with other deregulatory actions taken by the Trump administration and the Fed over the past year—would return Wall Street banks' capital requirements "to the irresponsibly low 2007 levels they had just before the 2008 crash."
“At a time of extreme and growing inequality, when tens of millions of Americans are struggling to pay their bills, today’s proposals will drain lending away from Main Street families’ needs and priorities and further enrich the already wealthy on Wall Street and the top 10% of Americans they focus on serving," Dennis Kelleher, the president of Better Markets, said in a statement. "The banking agencies’ proposals to loosen capital rules are a victory for Wall Street lobbying, and claims to the contrary are nothing more than an attempt to mislead the American people."
Fed Gov. Michael Barr, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden, was the central bank board's lone dissenting voice against the new rules, a product of years of aggressive Wall Street lobbying for less stringent regulations in the wake of the Great Recession.
"Today's proposals, if adopted, would harm the resilience of banks and the US financial system," Barr warned in a statement. "There are suggestions that liquidity requirements could also be reduced. Additionally, Federal Reserve supervisory staff have been cut by over 30%, and supervisory practices have been weakened. Banking is built on trust. I worry greatly that these actions are rapidly eroding that trust."
The new deregulatory package, which will be subject to a 90-day public comment period before it's finalized, comes as President Donald Trump is waging an expensive and deadly war on Iran with no end in sight and attacking social programs at home, from Medicaid to nutrition assistance.
“With private credit markets cratering, AI transforming the workforce, and Trump’s Iran war threatening the world economy, we need healthy, resilient, well-capitalized banks," said Bartlett Naylor, an economist for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. "Lessons learned after millions lost their jobs, homes, and savings following the 2008 megabank crash must not be ignored."
"Trump’s bank regulators propose to tear at the already tissue-thin layer of solvency levels at the nation’s banks," said Naylor. "Lowering solvency standards won’t generate more loans; it will only send banks closer to failure."
Matt Stoller, an anti-monopoly researcher and author of the BIG newsletter, wrote that the juxtaposition of a quagmire in Iran, Wall Street deregulation, and millions of Americans losing health insurance "tells the story" of the Trump administration.
Today's WSJ front page tells the story of the Trump admin.
#1: Hegseth Says ‘No Time Set’ on Ending Operations in Iran
#2: U.S. Regulators Propose More Lenient Capital Rules for Big Banks
#3: Millions of Americans Are Going Uninsured Following Expiration of ACA Subsidies pic.twitter.com/26jKsQuNc4
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) March 19, 2026
The effort to curb banks' capital requirements was spearheaded by Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman, a Trump appointee whose nomination last year was criticized by watchdogs as a "gift to the banking industry."
Kelleher of Better Markets said Thursday that "such counterproductive, shortsighted, and wrongheaded rulemaking isn’t a surprise given that the interests of Wall Street’s biggest banks are driving the priorities at the banking agencies, rather than facts, merit, and the public interest."
"The worst is at the Federal Reserve, where the senior regulatory staff comes from Wall Street’s top DC lobbyist (the Bank Policy Institute), Goldman Sachs, and one of Wall Street’s top law firms (a former partner is now the director responsible for supervising and regulating his recent Wall Street clients)," Kelleher observed. "That’s why mindless deregulation, especially for the biggest Wall Street banks, is at the top of the agenda, just as it was in the years before the 2008 crash."
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Trump 'Too Busy Siding With Wall Street,' Says Warren as US Credit Card Debt Crisis Explodes
A new analysis shows that over 40% of all US adults are unable to fully pay off their credit cards each month, leaving them trapped in "cycles of persistent debt."
Mar 17, 2026
US President Donald Trump promised repeatedly during his 2024 campaign to temporarily cap credit card interest rates at 10%, but—in the face of Wall Street opposition—he has done nothing concrete to fulfill that pledge since returning to the White House.
That failure, according to an analysis released Tuesday, has so far cost Americans $134.5 billion in interest payments. Every day, The Century Foundation (TCF) and Protect Borrowers estimate, US credit card holders are accruing $368 million more in interest than they would have if rates were capped at 10%. The average interest rate for credit cards in the US is currently around 25%, according to a Forbes measure.
In January, Trump called on Congress to approve a 10% cap on credit card interest rates for one year, and bipartisan legislation has been introduced in both the House and the Senate. But the president has not pressured bank-friendly Republicans to back the measure, and he vowed earlier this month to refuse to sign any legislation that reaches his desk unless lawmakers approve a massive voter suppression bill that is likely dead in the Senate.
“Trump could work with Congress to deliver on his promise to cap credit card interest rates at 10%—saving the average American with credit card debt about $900 a year," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Tuesday. "But he is too busy siding with Wall Street.”
The new analysis by TCF and Protect Borrowers shows that over 40% of adults in the US are "unable to pay off their credit card bills each month, trapping them in cycles of persistent debt that balloons ever-higher due to record-high, industry-inflated interest rates and predatory fees."
Collectively, around 111 million Americans carry more than $1 trillion in credit card debt month to month, according to the analysis, and more than 27 million Americans can't afford more than the minimum monthly payment on their cards.
"Americans’ monthly credit card payments have grown by nearly 40% since 2018, a trend that is continuing unabated under President Trump," TCF and Protect Borrowers found. "From 2018 to 2025, the average monthly credit card payment rose by $553, or 38% (from $1,441 to $1,994). This growth far outstrips inflation."
"Since Trump’s inauguration alone, the average annual amount that Americans pay in credit card bills grew by an additional $1,177 (from $22,756 to $23,933)," the groups added. "The pace of this growth suggests that, in large part due to soaring interest rates, families today devote more income to credit card payments than at any point in history."
The nation's worsening credit card debt crisis comes amid a broader affordability crisis in an economy that Trump has hailed as the "greatest" in history, despite all the glaring evidence to the contrary.
A West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America survey published last week found that roughly a third of respondents—equivalent to more than 80 million Americans—said they have had to skip a meal, borrow money, cut back on utilities, or make other painful trade-offs to afford healthcare expenses over the last 12 months as prices continue to rise across the economy.
“Grocery, utility, and healthcare bills are piling up, and Americans are increasingly turning to credit cards—some carrying interest rates exceeding 22%—just to make ends meet,” Jennifer Zhang, policy, research, and data Analyst at Protect Borrowers and co-author of the new analysis, said Tuesday.
“President Trump promised to tackle crushing credit card interest rates by January 20 of this year," Zhang added, "but that deadline has come and gone."
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‘Arsonist as Fire Chief’: Fed Appoints Wall Street Lobbyist to Key Bank Oversight Role
"There can be little doubt that having a Wall Street lawyer-lobbyist in charge of supervising and regulating his former Wall Street clients will likely result in a catastrophe for the American people."
Feb 25, 2026
The Federal Reserve board has quietly appointed a prominent Wall Street lawyer and lobbyist as the central bank's director of supervision and regulation, a move that one critic said was worse than "putting the fox in charge of the henhouse."
"This is like appointing a lifelong arsonist as a fire chief," Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, said in response to the Fed's decision to put Randall Guynn in a position to regulate the industry he has long represented.
Politico reported Tuesday that "Guynn, a prominent Wall Street lawyer, will become the next director of supervision and regulation at the Federal Reserve, effective March 8."
Before joining Fed staff last year as an adviser to the central bank's vice chair for supervision, Guynn worked for close to four decades at the corporate law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he recently chaired the company's Financial Institutions Group. According to Guynn's bio, he has "focused on advising banks of all sizes on their most critical financial regulatory issues and transactions."
Reuters, which first reported earlier this month that the Fed was expected to appoint Guynn to the bank policing role, noted that the decision "would mark a departure for the central bank, which since at least 1977 has filled the job with long-serving Fed career staff."
"The only reasonable expectation is that his leadership of Fed supervision and regulation will accelerate the Fed’s current push to implement policies that favor the biggest, most dangerous banks."
In a statement, Kelleher of Better Markets described Guynn as a "lawyer-lobbyist" who has "spent his entire professional life—almost 40 years—zealously and exclusively representing the interests of the financial industry, including the biggest financial firms on Wall Street."
A 2024 paper published in Cambridge University's Perspectives on Politics journal identified Guynn as part of a "vast subterranean world of regulatory influence-seeking" that has managed to escape the scrutiny of legislative lobbying.
"Reporting exceptions under the Lobbying Disclosure Act allow many of the most powerful advocates to characterize their activity as lawyering, not lobbying, and thereby fly under the radar," the paper notes.
Kelleher argued that, given Guynn's history, "the only reasonable expectation is that his leadership of Fed supervision and regulation will accelerate the Fed’s current push to implement policies that favor the biggest, most dangerous banks—his former clients just ten months ago and presumably his current circle of professional and personal friends."
"That will crush small banks, harm the Main Street economy, and make another financial crash inevitable. That’s what happened in the early 2000s when the Fed’s misguided belief that Wall Street could regulate itself directly led to the catastrophic 2008 crash," said Kelleher. "We don’t have to speculate. We can look at his attached record or read the remarkable story of how, as a lawyer-lobbyist prior to joining the Fed staff last year, he was instrumental in pushing through a back-door merger approval by the Fed."
"There can be little doubt that having a Wall Street lawyer-lobbyist in charge of supervising and regulating his former Wall Street clients will likely result in a catastrophe for the American people," he added.
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