I am a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts and would have voted for George McGovern for president in 1972 if I hadn’t been 12 years old at the time. I have never voted for a Republican in my life and most certainly didn't start this past November. I have very little respect for Donald Trump as a businessman and even less for him as a politician. I remain positively mystified about how enough of my fellow Americans in the right combination of Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin could have voted for a man so temperamentally and intellectually ill-suited for the job of president of the United States.

But — and it pains me to write this — as wrongheaded as I think Trump has been about nearly everything he has done in his first five weeks in the Oval Office, there is one huge thing he has been right about: Wall Street.

He is absolutely correct to seek to change the onerous financial regulations that have reigned down on both the big Wall Street banks and the smaller, more local banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. And it is on this foundational, fundamental issue that my like-minded liberals are dead wrong.

They’d like to impose more regulations on Wall Street. Big mistake. They’d like to break up the big Wall Street banks, and had even introduced legislation is recent years to do just — and that would even more wrong. They have argued that anyone who has ever worked on Wall Street should not be allowed to work in Washington — mind-boggling pigheaded and downright discriminatory.

Liberals find every aspect of Trump’s policy repugnant, and I get that. He is repugnant. But he is largely right about how to reform finance and Wall Street, whether most liberals care to admit that or not.

We’ve got to have a fact-based understanding of what Wall Street is and what it does. Think of it — and banks generally — as the magnificent engine of capitalism, taking money from people who want to save it or to invest it — bank depositors — and allocating it at a competitive price to those who want it or need it to start, to grow, or to nurture businesses around the world, and that provide so many of us the jobs and the incomes we need and want to live better, more fulfilling lives. It is the envy of the world, and one that has made the United States the dominant economic power in the past century.

A Harvard Business professor explains Donald Trump

You may think the banks are evil, but I bet you like your iPhone. You probably like your mortgage, your 401(k), your car, your widescreen TV and Facebook too. If you do, you like what Wall Street does, and you should want it to succeed.

But in the wake of the financial crisis, Washington politicians and regulators threw sand into the gears of the beautiful machine. It was an understandable populist reaction to the real pain and suffering that Wall Street, in large part, had caused the American people by packaging up shoddy mortgages and then selling them off around the world as AAA-rated investments, even though many bankers knew that they weren’t. That was wrong.

That bad behavior should have been prosecuted by Eric Holder’s Justice Department, but it wasn’t, not in a way that gave a measure of satisfaction to the American people that bad behavior wouldn't go unpunished. We needed accountability for the wrongdoing that bankers and traders perpetrated but instead we got market-crushing bureaucracy designed to turn banks into utilities.

But, of course, banks are not utilities, and shouldn’t be treated or regulated as ones. Supplying capital to those who want it is not the same as supplying electricity. Banks need to take risks — hopefully prudent ones — in order to nurture the next Apple, Google, Microsoft or General Electric when they come along. Reducing overly burdensome regulations on banks will get them lending again to the next batch of American companies that have the potential to change the world. Rewarding bankers, traders and executives to take smart risks, while punishing them when they mess up, will also help our economy grow quickly.

Trump is right that there should be an intelligent, well-considered reform of the onerous provisions of the rules and regulations imposed on banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The Dodd-Frank law, passed in 2010 to re-regulate banks, runs to more than 800 pages and is nearly opaque. More than additional 20,000 pages of rules and regulations have followed in its wake. Most people are clueless about what this mountain of paper requires banks to do. Some of it — that which requires higher capital requirements for big banks, less leverage, that derivatives to be traded on exchanges, even the much-maligned Consumer Protection Financial Bureau — is worthwhile and should be retained. But much of the law, and its various still-unfulfilled mandates, should be tossed out.

Random House

Investors in the equity markets seem to be heartened — euphoric even — about the overhaul of financial regulation that Trump has promised. Since his unexpected election victory, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has soared, and is now past 21,000, after being stuck around 17,500 for the last years of the Obama administration. More than $2.5 trillion of paper wealth has been created for people invested in the U.S. stock markets.

Whether the upward movement in stocks can be sustained remains to be seen, of course, but at least in this one isolated but highly important aspect — reducing regulation on Wall Street — the otherwise utterly irresponsible Trump administration is onto something.

Now read:Rex Nutting says Donald Trump and Gary Cohn are wrong in their claims about Dodd-Frank killing the economy

William Cohan is the author of “Why Wall Street Matters,” published on Feb. 28. Follow him on Twitter @WilliamCohan