With Trump 2.0, there does seem to be something for everyone in the financial arena: For bankers like Dimon, high on the wish list is the loosening of looming capital requirements, known as the “Basel III endgame,” that they say would reduce the amount of money they have available to lend, and ultimately profit. International regulators have argued that the proposed rules are needed to prevent another financial crisis.

Loading

CEOs with big pay packages contingent on rising stock prices are heartened that Trump, as he did in his first administration, is again agitating for lower interest rates, which generally propel financial markets higher by incentivising risk-taking.

Interest rates are set by the Federal Reserve, not the president directly, and they’re already on the way down. Still, Trump has shown no compunction about publicly insisting that the central bank keep rates low, despite a tradition that presidents generally steer clear of direct pressure on the Fed.

Lower rates would also be a boon for mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings and other cogs in the Wall Street moneymaking machine, which were jammed up during the past four years in the aftermath of the pandemic and under a Biden administration that had attempted to clamp down on big companies trying to get bigger.

When Trump appointed a former technology lobbyist, Gail Slater, to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division, he said he expected her to “facilitate, rather than stifle,” the corporate world, language that would not have been out of place in the Reagan deregulation movement.

And perhaps no one is more elated than cryptocurrency investors and venture capitalists, who embraced the once-bitcoin-sceptic president-elect and are hoping to be permitted to register and market new coins to ordinary investors. The price of bitcoin, a proxy for the hopes of the industry at large, recently touched $US100,000 and has shot up nearly 40 per cent since the election. The S&P 500 is up 6 per cent since then.

Loading

As ever with Trump, whose decision-making can be tough to predict, handicapping the chance of a long-term financial windfall from his time in office can be similar to reading a Rorschach test in which the same image can seem different depending on the viewer.

It’s easy enough to craft an argument for why financial optimism may be misplaced: Trump has talked up spending plans that would balloon the national debt and the imposition of tariffs and a renewal of tax cuts that could exacerbate inflation. A tightening of the US labour market caused by mass deportations of immigrants could also cause a spike in wages as companies are forced to compete aggressively for workers.

And heady times for Wall Street are often followed by economic troubles. The financial services industry has traditionally thrived right up to the brink of collapse, such as before the bursting of the internet bubble in 2000 and the mortgage market in 2007.

There was widespread exasperation among the finance set late last month when Trump threatened to impose a 25 per cent tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada. Wall Street hates uncertainty and a bubbling trade war between two of America’s largest trading partners would bring that in droves.

And yet not long after that threat, many financiers reached deep for a reason to focus on the positive by passing between one another a letter from January to investors from Trump’s Treasury secretary pick, Scott Bessent, which described tariffs as less important than they may seem because they would be “on the table but rarely discharged.”

A spokesperson for the Trump transition did not respond to a request for comment.

To Trump 2.0 converts like Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel who didn’t donate to the president-elect’s campaign, the tariff talk may well just be a starting point, rather than a serious pledge.

The president-elect “comes from a field — real estate — where the norms of negotiation are often different,” Griffin said last week at the DealBook Summit in New York. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, sounded a similarly conciliatory optimistic tone toward Trump’s administration at the event.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.