Matt Levine, Columnist

Stability Is Good for Business. Trump’s Whims Threaten It

One weekend came close to undoing the firm legal foundation on which U.S. business has thrived.

February 2, 2017 at 10:00 AM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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This article is part of the February 6, 2017 issue of businessweek.

In October 2016, Anthony Scaramucci compared the U.S. Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule to Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision protecting slavery and ruling that blacks couldn’t be citizens. “The left-leaning Department of Labor has made a decision to discriminate against a class of people who they deem to be adding no value,” said Scaramucci, a fund-of-funds marketer who was also an adviser and public supporter of Donald Trump’s campaign. And he said that, if elected, Trump would repeal the fiduciary rule.

Trump, however, never said that during his campaign. Instead, he promised to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. Scaramucci tried not to think about this: “I’ll make a prediction right now that he will not put a ban on Muslims coming into America,” he once told Gawker. Did he believe that? Or did he just think that the Department of Labor rule requiring financial advisers to put their customers’ interests ahead of their own is the great moral evil of our time, comparable to slavery, and that if Trump could repeal that rule then he was worth supporting, regardless of what he did about immigration?