They’re Making Risky Loans Again, and Trump, the Self-Proclaimed ‘King of Debt,’ Doesn’t Care
The art of hiding multi-trillions of dollars of debt has found an eager accomplice, the businessman who once proudly proclaimed, “I love debt”: Donald J. Trump.
The King of Debt is now in control of an obscure federal watchdog agency intended to prevent derivatives—complicated financial instruments that billionaire businessman Warren Buffett once described as “Weapons of Mass Destruction”—from causing the Great Recession of 2008. Intended is the keyword. The agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), was hog-tied by big money interests long before the first whiff of bank failure could drift from Wall Street’s canyons.
This December, Trump’s hand-picked CFTC members marked a decade of financial recovery by voting 3-2 in favor of leaving a giant hole in the regulatory framework known as Dodd-Frank. The vote leaves the Big Four—Too Big to Fail—U.S. banks free to slip the riskiest of their debt-deferring derivative trades through that defensive wall at will. And, this sleight of hand pushes an unsuspecting public onto the firing line of another possible multi-trillion-dollar U.S. taxpayer bailout.