What Will Trump Do About Wall Street? CEOs Ask White House To Reconsider Financial Regulations

In a letter to President Donald Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, a trade group chaired by executives like JP Morgan Chase & Co. chief executive Jamie Dimon and Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson asked the administration to consider or reconsider 16 federal regulations, four of which concerned finance and corporate governance. According to at least one reporter following Trump’s Thursday meeting with corporate executives, the president will likely be on board with such proposals.

The list, from Business Roundtable, a trade group of chief executives of major American firms pushing for public policy more hospitable to their companies’ interests, stemmed from an internal survey of members “to identify recent regulations that are of most concern,” the letter, signed by Eastman Chemical Company CEO Mark Costa, who chairs the group’s committee on regulatory issues.

Read on for a list of the four financial rules Business Roundtable believes are in need of a makeover, and why the company leaders may want them altered or disposed of altogether.

Shareholder proposal process

First on the list is a suggested move not away from regulatory oversight, but toward it, as a means of tightening the leash on activist investors — shareholders who have increasingly striven to exert influence on the companies in which they hold stakes in recent years, often leading campaigns for the terminations of those companies’ CEOs.

“In too many cases, activist investors with insignificant stakes in public companies make shareholder proposals that pursue social or political agendas unrelated to the interests of the shareholders as a whole,” the letter stated, adding that Business Roundtable had previously encouraged the Securities and Exchange Commission to set more limits.

CEO Pay Ratio Disclosure Rule

In August 2015, the SEC approved by a narrow 3-2 vote a rule requiring publicly-traded companies to disclose the ratio between CEOs’ annual salaries and the median income of the rest of the company’s employees.

The SEC described the rule, which applied to companies’ fiscal years starting on or after Jan. 1, 2017, as a way to provide more information to shareholders that “they can use to evaluate a CEO’s compensation,” while many argued its intent was purely “to shame CEOs.” In its letter to Cohn, Business Roundtable called the ratio “arbitrary and often meaningless.” Acting SEC Chairman Michael S. Piwowar has already made an effort to delay it by extending its comment period.

Conflict Minerals Disclosure Rule

The SEC regulation keeping publicly-traded corporations from purchasing minerals whose profits go toward human rights abuses and war crimes in the Congo — which, like the rule on CEO pay ratio, was a part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act — also made Business Roundtable’s list. And, also like the pay ratio rule, it has already been thwarted by Piwowar, who directed his staff on Jan. 31 “to reconsider whether the 2014 guidance on conflict minerals rule is still appropriate.”

Business Roundtable said the regulations “impose extraordinary compliance costs while failing to demonstrate humanitarian benefits in Africa.”

Margin Requirements for Un-cleared Swaps

The rule, also a component of Dodd-Frank, set requirements on the percentage of a security that can be used as collateral for a loan financing its purchase and sought to offset the financial market’s systematic risks. In its letter, Business Roundtable said it didn’t seek to kill the regulation, but requested a “transitional period” starting March 1, effectively delaying total compliance.