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Trump executive orders will target tax rules, 'too big to fail' financial institutions

President Trump aims to dismantle even more financial regulations with executive orders on Friday, directing Treasury officials to take another look at tax rules and oversight of "too big to fail" financial institutions, an aide said.

<p><span style="color: rgb(26, 26, 26); font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; background-color: rgb(247, 247, 247);">US President Donald Trump speaks during a reception for Senators and their spouses in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, March 28, 2017. (JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)</span></p>

President Trump aims to dismantle even more financial regulations with executive orders on Friday, directing Treasury officials to take another look at tax rules and oversight of "too big to fail" financial institutions, an aide said.

In a signing ceremony at the Department of the Treasury, Trump will once again signal that he intends to roll back many of the sweeping regulations the Obama administration adopted in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the orders will:

► Review significant tax regulations issued in 2016 and 2017 that are overly complex and "impose an undue financial burden" on taxpayers. While Mnuchin said no specific rules were being targeted, he acknowledged that Obama rules on so-called "inversions" would be among them. Tax inversions allow multinational corporations to get favorable tax treatment by merging with companies in lower-taxed countries.

"It’s obviously one of the significant things, and one of the things we'll be looking at," Mnuchin told USA TODAY. "We’ve got 100 people in the tax department across the street at Treasury, and they are looking at everything."

► Direct the Treasury Secretary not to use orderly liquidation authority to bail out insolvent financial institutions, reigniting the debate over a key provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Critics have said that provision could actually allow banks to take more risks than they ordinarily would, and Trump wants to re-examine whether court-supervised bankruptcy would be a better way to wind down failing banks.


► Review the process for the Financial Stability Oversight Council to designate non-bank financial institutions like insurance companies as "systemically important" to the financial system. Those companies are then subject to additional oversight by the Federal Reserve.

Trump's order will impose a 180-day moratorium on new designations.

Like most of Trump's regulatory executive orders, Friday's presidential actions will have little effect by themselves. Instead, Trump will instruct regulators to reexamine existing rules with an eye to rescinding them. But that process of deregulation can be as complicated as the original regulations, requiring the Treasury Department to ask for public comment and conduct a legal analysis.

And Mnuchin said the orders don't give him any authority he doesn't already have. "The purpose of the orders is to make clear what the administration's and the president's priorities are, and signal the importance of these issues to the American people," he said.

The actions to be signed Friday include one executive order and two similar directives called called presidential memoranda.

In his first 92 days, Trump will have signed 25 executive orders and 15 presidential memoranda.

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