Banks’ surprising request: Don’t trash Dodd-Frank

Big banks have a surprising message for President-elect Donald Trump: Amend Dodd-Frank, but don’t fully repeal it

Big banks have delivered a surprising request to President-elect Donald Trump: they don’t want him to kill Dodd-Frank.

“We’re not asking for wholesale throwing out Dodd-Frank,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said at a conference this week.

That’s not what many – including House Republicans – want to hear. Many have called for a full repeal of the controversial financial law, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has even proposed legislation to entirely replace Dodd-Frank. Trump’s team has talked about rolling back the law, though it hasn’t explicitly said it would push for full repeal.

The banks do want modification of Dodd-Frank, according to the Journal. Rather than repeal, big banks are pushing for the government to make “regulation simpler and less costly, but don’t return banking to the Wild West days that preceded the financial crisis,” the Journal reported.

The Journal noted that in the years since Dodd-Frank, banks have spent hundreds of millions of dollars becoming compliant to the regulations introduced under the new regime. After all that time and money, upending the regulatory landscape yet again would leave in disarray business models they’ve worked for years to perfect.

The biggest concern right now, according to big banks, is that no new regulations get thrown their way.

“The first thing I would ask for is nothing new, no new rules,” John Gerspach, head of finance at Citigroup, said at the conference. “If you haven’t figured out yet how all the existing rules work together, don’t put on anything else.”