As a candidate, Donald Trump sent mixed signals on where he stood when it came to Wall Street. Though the former real-estate mogul initially called for Dodd-Frank to be “torn up” and said that he “disagreed” with calls to break up big banks, in a later campaign speech he told voters, “I know Wall Street. I know the people on Wall Street . . . I’m not going to let Wall Street get away with murder.” So far, the president seems to be proceeding with his former inclinations, easing up on financial penalties, appointing an acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director who doesn’t believe the agency should exist, and generally taking a kinder, gentler approach to policing the industry, which the president recently cast as a victim of overzealous regulation. And that’s not all! Thanks to his giant corporate tax cut, Trump has effectively rescued banks from the scariest scenario of all: making less money.

As the country’s five biggest banks began to report fourth-quarter results this week, a foreboding pattern emerged: terrible trading results, with their collective slumps in fixed-income trading exceeded analysts’ expectations of a 22-percent drop. Goldman Sachs, for whom the situation is especially frightening given its historic reliance on trading as a moneymaking endeavor, posted its worst quarter in bond trading since 2008, with a 50 percent drop in revenue in that unit, and a 14 percent drop in equities trading, at a time when global stock markets are reaching new highs on a near-daily basis.

But whereas the situation would normally have set chief executives rocking back and forth in the fetal position, recent legislation has cushioned the blow. As Bloomberg notes, “The sweeping tax overhaul means billions of dollars in profit will materialize from thin air for the industry, allowing executives the luxury of planning to increase dividends and stock repurchases, invest more in technology, and even do some good by extending credit to low-income borrowers. That’s all taking away attention from what probably would’ve been the focus of analysts and investors: lousy trading results.” Thanks to the bill, which might as well be called “Your Financial Institution Is About to Amass More Money Than the U.S. Mint Can Physically Print” Act, banks are expected to increase profits by more than $10 billion annually. (That’s on top of the record profits they’ve been enjoying, no thanks to cripplingly unfair regulation and suffocatingly high corporate tax rates.)

It’s not the only way in which Trump’s tax cuts have papered over certain weaknesses in the market. Last month, the White House got some good P.R. when AT&T and NBCUniversal said they would hand out $1,000 bonuses to staff. A handful of other major corporations made similar announcements—a positive sign, on the surface, after years of stagnant wage growth. But beyond the immediate optics, the economic divide is as wide as ever, and getting worse—a fact that Bank of America C.E.O. Brian Moynihan made painfully obvious on Wednesday. Following Citigroup’s announcement that it returned at least $60 billion to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks, Moynihan said that the bank’s shareholders can look forward to “the largest portion” of the tax-bill benefits. “We expect most of the benefits from tax reform to flow to the bottom line through dividends and share buybacks,” he added, in case that was unclear.

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Eric Trump: my father isn’t racist because he only cares about money