Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman defended Dodd-Frank in an interview with CNBC on Thursday, weighing in on the uncertain future of the act under the incoming Trump administration.
“Let me be very clear about this, I am not a fan of getting rid of Dodd-Frank,” Stanley told CNBC.
However, he continued, “There are elements of Dodd-Frank that clearly need to be curtailed.”
Shortly after winning the election, President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team posted his plans for the first days in office, which included his plan to “dismantle” the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.
The website calls Dodd-Frank a “sprawling and complex piece of legislation that has unleashed hundreds of new rules and several new bureaucratic agencies,” including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Not too long after Trump’s team announced their plans, Trump’s U.S. Treasury Secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin also gave his thoughts on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act in an interview with CNBC.
During the interview, Mnuchin said, “The No. 1 problem with Dodd-Frank is it is way too complicated and it cuts back lending.”
“We want to strip back parts of Dodd-Frank that prevent banks from lending and that will be the No. 1 priority on the regulatory side,” he told CNBC.
As it stands, there’s already a Republican-led effort underway in Congress to repeal and replace Dodd-Frank and many of its regulations.
But to Gorman, the market needs to focus on moving forward. “In others words, let’s accept that we might have actually done the right thing in the last several years and stop trying to redo the right thing because the more change we make at this point, the more destructive it becomes to the markets,” he said.
Here’s the full CNBC interview:
