The Return of the Unrepentant: How Trump’s Deregulation Rebuilt the Crisis We Claimed to Solve

Financial crises are never just about numbers—they are about power. They expose the moral assumptions, institutional failures, and structural inequalities embedded in our economic system. In the wake of the 2008 collapse, I argued that the crisis was as much about the erosion of social trust and ethical obligation as it was about toxic assets and regulatory breakdowns. What we are witnessing now is a chilling echo—not because we forgot the past, but because those in power remembered, and chose to recreate it.

They say history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. In finance, it doesn’t just rhyme—it resurfaces. What we’re facing is not merely the return of risk, but the return of a deliberate strategy: a process David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession. The dismantling of financial regulations, the weakening of consumer protections, and the capture of oversight institutions are not policy failures. They are tools—used to redistribute wealth upward by stripping the public of safeguards, assets, and trust.

This isn’t a case of economic drift. It is a project—engineered and executed with remarkable precision.

When the 2008 crisis struck, it exposed the hollow core of an economy built on unregulated speculation and moral hazard. In response, we enacted reforms like the Dodd-Frank Act to impose guardrails. These were imperfect but necessary—signaling a renewed commitment to transparency, accountability, and public protection.

But that brief moment of course correction ended when Donald Trump took office. His administration moved swiftly to dismantle those safeguards. The threshold for “systemically important” banks was raised, allowing dozens of mid-sized institutions to avoid rigorous oversight—including Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed in 2023. Stress tests were weakened. Capital buffers were reduced. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, designed to shield Americans from predatory financial practices, was effectively defanged.

Trump sold this agenda as pro-growth, anti-red tape governance. But what it actually achieved was far more corrosive: it gave powerful financial actors a free pass to speculate, conceal risk, and offload the costs of failure onto everyone else.

Today, financial institutions are once again bloated with risk. The dollar may appear strong globally, but at home, inflation erodes its value. Consumers are drowning in credit card debt and high-interest loans. Wages stagnate. Housing costs soar. And trust—once the cornerstone of finance—is in short supply.

None of this is accidental. It is the result of a political ideology that confuses wealth with wisdom and treats regulation as an obstacle to be removed, rather than a scaffold that holds the system together. Deregulation has not only weakened financial resilience—it has eroded the moral foundation on which finance depends.

Credit is not just a transaction. It is a relationship grounded in obligation and built on trust. When those relationships are replaced with opaque instruments, algorithmic decisions, and political favors, we don’t just risk collapse. We lose legitimacy.

Trump’s “America First” mantra extended into finance with devastating effect. It framed the liberation of elite institutions from public responsibility as patriotic common sense. What followed was a fragile ecosystem in which extraction is sold as innovation, and systemic instability is normalized.

This is not new. It is the reactivation of the same logic that drove the 2008 collapse—just with fewer restraints. What Harvey described as accumulation by dispossession is now hardwired into our regulatory DNA. The public loses protections. The elite gains leverage. And when things fall apart—as they always do—the burden is again socialized.

We are witnessing the consequences of short-term thinking packaged as reform. The same actors who helped orchestrate the last financial collapse are back, more emboldened, and less regulated. We’re told to focus on innovation, on growth, on the resilience of markets—but the fundamentals are deeply skewed.

This isn’t simply about economics. It is about how power is structured, who bears risk, and whose interests the state ultimately serves. And until we name that structure—and those responsible for building and benefiting from it—we will remain locked in a cycle of crisis, reform, and relapse.

Escaping that cycle requires more than technical fixes. It requires political will and moral clarity. We must reclaim the ethical foundations of finance and reassert the role of public accountability. Regulation is not punishment. It is the framework that allows markets to function in ways that are stable, fair, and legitimate.

The return of financial instability was not inevitable. It was engineered. And if we fail to see the logic behind it—this strategy of dispossession masquerading as deregulation—we will continue paying the price, again and again.

Citations:

Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park. “An Anthropology of the 2008 Credit Crisis.” In Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance: Power, Ethics, and Social Capital across the Last Millennium, edited by Francesca Trivellato, Sophus A. Reinert, and Steven L. Kaplan, 279–296. New York: Routledge, 2021.

Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.