 (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) By Matt O'Brien During the campaign, Donald Trump liked to brag that, unlike his rivals, he wasn't in Wall Street's pocket. And you can tell that by the fact that he's stocked his cabinet with Goldman Sachs alums, has signaled that he wants to dismantle the post-crisis rules reining in banks, and will now allow brokers to go back to giving their clients deliberately bad advice. This is Wall Street's kind of populism. That last part, what's known as the fiduciary rule, was something the Obama administration only changed in the last year. Up until then, you see, it was perfectly legal for your financial adviser to give you advice that wasn't in your best interest, but was in theirs. In other words, to push you into products that wouldn't increase your returns, but would increase your fees. Wall Street, of course, didn't take too kindly to a rule that the administration estimated would cost them $17 billion a year in lost revenue. They claimed that the compliance costs alone would make their advice so expensive that middle-class families would no longer be able to afford it. Or, in the case of Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci, that this was like the 1857 Dred Scott decision—which held that black people were not citizens—since telling brokers that they couldn't give bad advice was allegedly just a way for the government to "discriminate against a class of people who they deem to be adding no value." But no more. The Trump administration is going to let financial advisers go back to ripping you off. Read the rest on Wonkblog. | 
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