A Poison Pill for the Recovery - NYT Editorial Board
On a day when President Trump was handed some good news about jobs and had top business executives gathered around him, what did he do? He made it clear that he plans to smash a pillar of the economic recovery.
Mr. Trump met the news on Friday that 227,000 new jobs were added last month, the biggest gain since September, by signing a directive that calls for rolling back the Dodd-Frank Act. That’s the 2010 law to rein in the reckless, deceptive and predatory financial practices that both caused and amplified the devastation of the Great Recession.
At the meeting with business leaders, he boasted about his Dodd-Frank destruction plan to chief executives like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo and Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone Group, the private equity firm. He complained that his friends in the business world “can’t get any money because the banks just won’t let them borrow it because of the rules and regulations in Dodd-Frank.” That’s ridiculous. Corporate America has been enjoying robust profits, and the stock market is near its all-time high. Certainly, none of the companies represented in that meeting are having a hard time getting credit.
If he would instead listen to the business community, he’d learn that many companies and their executives are deeply concerned about the effect of Mr. Trump’s other policies, like his executive order banning visitors and immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Travis Kalanick, the chief executive of Uber, the taxi-alternative service, on Thursday announced that he would not attend the White House meeting and would leave the president’s business advisory council because of his dismay with that order. “Immigration and openness to refugees is an important part of our country’s success and quite honestly to Uber’s,” he wrote in an email to employees, many of whom had called on him to distance himself from the president.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/opinion/a-poison-pill-for-the-recovery.html?emc=edit_th_20170204&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284
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