Is Regulation Good For The Economy? Americans Divided If Government Should Regulate Financial Industry

While President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have recently taken steps to limit, dismantle or outright eliminate financial industry regulations over the past few weeks, Americans remained divided over whether such rules were needed, according to results from a Pew Research Center poll released Thursday.

Of all respondents, 49 percent said the government “has not gone far enough regulating financial institutions,” compared to 42 percent who believed the government “has gone too far” in doing so. But along ideological lines, the split varied, with 62 percent of Democrats saying the government hadn’t done quite enough to rein in the financial industry. That was in comparison to 29 percent who thought the government overstepped its boundaries, and 31 percent of Republicans viewing current regulation as insufficient, compared to 63 percent who saw it as over-the-top.

The younger the participants, the more likely they were to believe that increased financial industry regulation was warranted. The same was true as education levels grew higher, with 56 percent of college graduates seeing the government’s oversight of the financial sector as insufficient, compared to 41 percent of those with a high school degree or less.

Within his first five weeks in office, Trump, along with members of the House and Senate, has done quite a bit to please the anti-regulatory cohort.

Most recently, Acting Labor Secretary Edward Hugler, in accordance with a directive from Trump, delayed the implementation of a rule requiring financial advisers to put their clients’ interests above their own Wednesday. Reports surfaced Tuesday that House Republicans were in the process of drafting a bill to completely annihilate the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a 2010 law that sought to correct for the financial industry malpractices that led to the 2008 crisis. On Friday, Trump signed an executive order establishing deregulatory teams within federal agencies, a move that supplemented an earlier executive order mandating that for every new agency regulation introduced, two must be slashed.