Wall Street Execs Have Stopped Taking the President of the United States Seriously

Time was, a U.S. president declaring that he was “looking into” breaking up the big banks would have been cause for concern on Wall Street—or at least cause for making some big changes to one’s portfolio. Today, with Donald Trump spouting off or tweeting about every little thing that passes through his head, things are very different. So when the commander in chief announced on Monday that he was considering bringing back Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that separated investment and retail banking, the markets barely reacted, falling just slightly before recovering. We and others noted that this was presumably because, despite an initial valiant attempt to take him both literally and seriously, considering that he’s the president of the United States, investors and the business community have begun taking everything Trump says or tweets with a giant, coarse grain of artisanal sea salt. Not only will the majority of things he’s claiming to be “looking into” not actually result in policy, but many of those things will never actually even be “looked into.” He’s literally just making things up as he goes along, and for Wall Street, it‘s not worth the time or energy to worry about Trump’s stream of consciousness. Still, it’s pretty amazing to hear business leaders actually voice their new “Don’t listen to anything the president says” approach, even anonymously, as they have at this week’s Milken Institute Global Conference.

“I don't take Trump seriously,” a senior executive with “one of the country’s six largest banks” told Reuters. “I’m listening less and less.” According to reporters Lawrence Delevingne, Svea Herbst-Bayliss, and Olivia Oran, the comments “were echoed by at least a dozen institutional investors and bank executives who spoke to Reuters.” Regulatory lawyer Aaron Cutler also told the news outlet that you can’t bank on anything from Trump “until it’s signed into law” and that his clients have not yet acted on anything out of the administration.

As Ritholtz Wealth Management C.E.O. Josh Brown said Monday on CNBC, “Stop—please don't make changes to your portfolio based on things that get blurted out.”

Joining the pile-on was this sad report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, per Reuters:

Despite Trump’s talk of quick action, PwC predicts his executive orders will “yield few results,” that plans to repeal a package of financial regulations called Dodd-Frank will not happen, and that any change in Washington will be slow due to a lack of consensus, a slothy appointments process and upcoming midterm elections.

Offering the contrarian, friend-of-Trump take is real-estate investor, Trump buddy, and inaugural party planner Tom Barrack, who said on a Milken panel Tuesday, with a completely straight face, that the big guy’s “lack of predictability has gained respect.”

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G.O.P. lawmakers hoping to gut Dodd-Frank think Dems should calm down

Back in April, House Financial Services Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling described the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency set up to protect consumers from being ripped off, as “a dictator.” Now, though, the representative from Texas has absolutely no time for rhetorical flourishes, not when he‘s working on an issue near and dear to his heart: rolling back financial regulations. Per CNN Money:

At the outset of a markup of House Financial Services Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling's bill to scale back the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, Democratic lawmakers blasted the plan as “immoral,” calling it “poisonous” and “a deeply misguided” piece of legislation that would only bring harm to American families and come to the rescue of Wall Street.

“The bill is rotten to the core, and simply carries water for Trump and his buddies on Wall Street,” said Maxine Waters, a top Democrat on the panel. Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat, said the bill would take the American financial system back to the “regulatory Stone Age,” adding it as a “middle finger to consumers, regulators, investors and the market,” which drew soft gasps from Republican lawmakers in the hearing room.

Republican lawmakers rushed to rebuke Democrat's statements on the bill, referring to them as “hyperbole.”

“Oh you meant ALL my holdings?”

Today in Trump-family conflicts of interest, The Wall Street Journal reports that First Son-in-Law and America’s C.E.O. Jared Kusher failed to disclose that he is “currently a part-owner of a real-estate finance start-up and has a number of loans from banks on properties that he co-owns.” The start-up, called Cadre, pairs investors with “big real-estate projects,” making Kushner a current business partner of, among others, Goldman Sachs, George Soros, and Peter Thiel. The stake in Cadre, which Ivanka’s husband started in 2014 with his brother, Joshua Kushner, and friend Ryan Williams is apparently just “one of many interests—and ties to large financial institutions—that Mr. Kushner didn’t identify on his disclosure form,” according to the Journal’s analysis of securities and other filings.

The others include “loans totaling at least $1 billion, from more than 20 lenders, to properties and companies part-owned by Mr. Kushner,” for which he has personally guaranteed more than $300 million of debt. Forgetting to disclose certain details that ethic experts deem relevant is sort of becoming Kushner’s thing, like his father-in-law’s thing is using an entire bottle of self-tanner in one sitting. Last month, The New York Times reported he failed to mention all the times he met with Sergey N. Gorkov, the head of Russian state-owned bank Vnesheconombank, and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador who has seemingly become a close personal friend of every member of Team Trump. But don’t get any ideas that anything underhanded is afoot: Kushner’s lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, told the Journal that the Cadre stake falls under a company he owns called BFPS Ventures LLC, which is reported in his financial disclosures (the Journal points out that that disclosure doesn’t mention anything about Cadre). Anyway, a “revised version” of the Kush’s financial holdings will apparently be made public once it’s been certified by ethics officials, and the Cadre stake will be mentioned there. As you were.

United Airlines C.E.O. continues apology tour

Oscar Munoz, the C.E.O. of United Airlines who’s been having a pretty, pretty, pretty bad few weeks, stopped by Congress today for a ritual flogging by House Transportation Committee, following an incident last month wherein a passenger was dragged by the arms and legs off a flight in a scene that resembled an Ultimate Fighting match. Although these sorts of exercises usually fall along party lines, with Republican congressmen going easy on anyone testifying who works for a corporation, members of the committee united in a bipartisan fashion to give Munoz a metaphorical beating that rivaled the one suffered by passenger Dr. David Dao. The award for the best performance goes to Representative Duncan Hunter, who asked Munoz, “Why do you hate the American people? I was going to ask how much do you hate the American people, but I’m not going to ask that.”

Elsewhere!

Jamie Dimon says biggest fear is bad public policy (Reuters)

Investors Pull Almost $7 Billion from Hedge Fund Giant in Four Months (W.S.J.)

When Barclays’s Jes Staley Went to Bat for an In-Law, a Powerful Client Cried Foul (W.S.J.)

Here’s What Billions Gets Wrong About the Municipal Bond Market (Bloomberg)

AMD Stock on Course for Worst Day in More than a Decade (Bloomberg)

Outsourcing company offers 10,000 workers to appease President Trump (The Hive)

The city of Philadelphia just gave Wells Fargo its walking papers (CNBC)

Coal Country Is Back, Along with Signing Bonuses and Pay Raises (Bloomberg)

Meet the ‘Wine Whisperers,’ Fancy Grape Fixers for Billionaires (Bloomberg)