Our national nightmare continues as Mad King Don trades bank deregulation for God knows what political contributions. Anyone who was awake through the aftermath of the 2008 crash will recognize that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. Via the New York Times:
We’re watching history repeat itself in real time, and apparently nobody in Washington learned a damn thing from 2008. The Trump administration is systematically dismantling the safeguards that were put in place after the financial crisis—the very regulations designed to prevent banks from gambling away our economy again. They’re gutting agencies created specifically to keep Wall Street’s greed in check, rolling back restrictions on risky assets like cryptocurrency, and even hitting pause on foreign anti-bribery enforcement. Because what could possibly go wrong?
The financial sector is having a field day. Banks are raking in profits from every direction: merger deals are booming thanks to lax antitrust oversight, real estate loans that looked shaky are suddenly golden again, and the trading desks are printing money as markets hit record highs. Big bank stocks surged 29 percent last year—nearly double the overall market’s gains. And at JPMorgan, the CEO pulled in roughly $770 million in total compensation for 2025 alone, as the bank’s stock jumped 34 percent.
This is the same playbook we saw before the housing bubble burst and took down the global economy. Remove the guardrails, let Wall Street run wild with risky bets, and ignore all the warning signs until it’s too late. The prophets of doom were ignored in 2007 too—dismissed as alarmist buzzkills who didn’t understand the “new paradigms” of finance. We all know how that story ended: with taxpayers bailing out the very banks whose recklessness destroyed millions of jobs, homes, and retirements.
The setup is all there again. Deregulation? Check. Banks diving back into risky assets? Check. Regulators asleep at the wheel? Check. Massive Wall Street paydays while the rest of us watch nervously? Check. Don’t say you weren’t warned when this house of cards comes tumbling down. The only question is when, not if.
PS Don’t get us started about the Epstein corruption:
