President Trump has put into action a raft of changes aimed at the financial regulation Obama created and passed by Congress following the financial crisis of 2008.

A combination of executive orders and memoranda hit the Dodd-Frank Act, one of Obama’s legacies, and reversed the fiduciary rule, which stipulates that brokers must act in their client’s best interest rather than maximising their own profit when providing retirement advice. Bad financial advice was a major contributing factor to the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

The reason for this latest major repeal? In part, it helps his friends.

“We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank, because frankly, I have so many people, friends of mine that had nice businesses, they can’t borrow money,” Trump said in the State Dining Room not far from Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and Stephen Schwarzian of the Blackstone Group. “They just can’t get any money because the banks just won’t let them borrow it because of the rules and regulations in Dodd-Frank.”