President-elect Donald Trump may have campaigned on the premise that the economy was rigged, but now it seems like he's "trying to restore the inequities that existed before the financial crisis," best-selling author Michael Lewis told CNBC on Tuesday.



Trump's incoming administration is already talking about rolling back portions of the Dodd-Frank banking regulations and weakening the Volcker Rule, which restricts U.S. banks from making certain kinds of speculative investments with their own money.

Lewis, who wrote about the financial crisis in "The Big Short," said what "terrifies" him is the possibility that capital requirements on banks will be reduced.

"If things go well, traders keep the money and if things go badly, it becomes the taxpayers' problem," he said in an interview with CNBC's "Power Lunch."

"This kind of weird socialism for elite Wall Street guys is what got us into the politics that we have today," he said.

However, Lewis cautioned that trying to predict what Trump will actually do is "stupid."

"I don't think this is some well-thought-out strategy. I think it's like you never know what he's going to do next. And if you try to tell a story about it that predicts where he's going to go, I think you're going to end up looking like a fool," he said.