This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 9th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Trump's executive order on financial regulation didn't direct agencies to do that much, but it did set some of the new terms

for future Financial Regulation.

Thea Brooke Knight is Associate Director of Financial Regulation Studies at the Cato Institute.

We spoke this week.

With several of President Trump's executive orders thus far,

they have been tagged with, to the maximum extent allowed by law or something similar which indicates let's look into this and so with respect to Dodd Frank something that he was very critical of on the campaign trail and something that a lot of people blame for the slower than anticipated recovery, the decline of community bank lending around the country, what has this

executive order done? Well it doesn't actually do a lot in terms of actions that he's directing anybody to take, but it does set a new

framework for evaluating financial regulation.

And it's not explicitly saying Dodd-Frank. It's not an executive order for

Dodd-Frank. It's actually broader than that. It's an executive order for federal financial

regulation. The only thing that it directs anybody to do with this point is he directed the Secretary of the Treasury

to issue a report on financial regulation in the US.

But more importantly, this sets out a framework for evaluating financial regulation.

So it's in some ways more philosophical than anything else.

But some of the points that it makes are important and are considerations that have been

absent from financial regulation policy post-crisis.

So for example, in Section 1, one of the core, it's this list of core principles, and one of the

core principles that the Secretary of the Treasury is supposed to use in evaluating

financial regulation is whether the regulation empowers Americans to make independent financial

decisions and informed choices in the marketplace.

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