As promised, President Donald Trump took his first step toward pulling back the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform act after just 13 days in office. And bank investors cheered.
Trump signed the executive order Friday, which calls for the Treasury secretary to review the sweeping set of reforms created after the 2008-9 financial crisis. The news helped send shares of the seven biggest banks by market capitalization on the S&P 500 up by $35.4 billion. That’s a 3% jump from the seven companies’ combined market cap of $1.23 trillion, with Morgan Stanley leading the pack on a 5.6% jump.
Other big banks benefitting from the order include Wells Fargo, which gained 2.2%; Bank of America, 2.5%; Citigroup, 3%; Goldman Sachs, 4.3%; and U.S. Bancorp, 1.2%.
Investors are expecting banks to benefit from Trump’s lower corporate taxes and looser bank regulations, while Trump’s fiscal stimulus package is also expected to push interest rates up higher — another boon for bank stocks. The Financial Select Sector SPDR Fund, an exchange-traded fund tracking the industry, has risen 18.6% since Trump won the election.
Other financial services stocks such as Visa, Invesco, and Synchrony Financial all ranked on the top 10 performing S&P 500 stocks Friday.
As of 3 p.m. Friday, all of the seven bank stocks, aside from Bank of America, have erased its losses from a week earlier, when Trump’s ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations weighed on markets.
Still, while banks cheer potential changes to Dodd-Frank, they (and certainly Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein) are less optimistic about Trump’s immigration ban. Blankfein wrote a letter denouncing Trump’s executive order on immigration earlier this week, adding that it could disrupt operations. To see what other banks had to say, including Wells Fargo and BofA, click here.