In response to reports that Wall Street enforcement is down under President Trump, DNC spokesperson Daniel Wessel released the following statement:

“This is just the latest example of how President Trump has sided with Wall Street over Main Street. Trump refuses to hold Wall Street accountable and is looking to roll back other financial regulations that rein in big banks. Instead of protecting consumers and small business from the reckless greed of Wall Street, Trump is letting Wall Street run wild. He railed against Wall Street on the campaign trail and said he was not beholden to special interests, but as president, Trump has invited Wall Street into the White House, done their bidding, and once again sold out his voters.”

Wall Street Journal: Regulators’ Penalties Against Wall Street Are Down Sharply in 2017

Business-friendly shift under President Trump is only one factor, as enforcement actions from the financial crisis wind down

By Jean Eaglesham, Dave Michaels and Danny Dougherty

Wall Street regulators have imposed far lower penalties in the first six months of Donald Trump’s presidency than they did during the first six months of 2016, a comparable period in the Obama administration, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

Lawyers who defend financial cases said a shift to a business-friendly stance at regulatory agencies in the Trump administration is one of several reasons for the decrease. Other factors include delays resulting from the change in administrations and the winding down of cases from the financial crisis.

Penalties levied against firms and individuals by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in the first half of 2017 were down nearly two-thirds compared with the first half of 2016—putting regulators on track for the lowest annual level of fines since at least 2010, the Journal found. Fines of $489 million in the first half of 2017 compared with $1.4 billion in the 2016 period.

The SEC levied some $318 million in penalties during the first half of 2017, a search of federal court documents and all publicly available records on the agency’s website and data provided by Andrew N. Vollmer, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, showed. Last year, agency actions yielded $750 million in penalties during the same period, an agency spokesman said. The SEC declined to disclose its own tally of 2017 penalties; the agency didn’t dispute that the total value of penalties fell in the first half of 2017 compared with the same term in 2016.

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