When a London financier says Trump is ending “the age of American capital,” I hear something different than he intends.
My old Democrat self would have read Bill Blain’s column this week and panicked. A British financial analyst warning that Trump is undermining the banks, threatening the Fed chair, destabilizing the system that made America dominant. The old Garrett would have shared it on Facebook with a crying emoji and something about “this is not normal.”
The new Garrett reads it differently. When Blain writes that Trump’s demands on banks “highlights how little he really understands the power of the US economy,” I see a man who doesn’t understand that Trump understands it perfectly. He’s disrupting it on purpose. And that terrifies people like Blain.
What Blain Actually Admits
Here’s what’s fascinating. Blain spends half his column explaining that US banks got powerful because they were “freed from regulatory oversight” after 2008. European banks, he says, were “kept on very tight regulatory leashes.” The result? America dominated global capital while Europe flatlined.
A Democrat would read that and think: “See? We need to regulate our banks too!” But that’s backwards. What Blain is actually admitting is that regulatory freedom made America exceptional. European banks became, in his words, obsessed with “regulatory reporting and compliance.” They got woke. They stopped taking risks. They died.
And now Blain is worried Trump will do the same thing to American banks? Please. Trump isn’t regulating banks. He’s telling them to stop gouging regular Americans with 25% credit card rates. There’s a difference between government control and government accountability.
The Panic Is the Point
Blain writes that traders are “exhausted” by Trump’s announcements. He compares it to “riding a gale at sea.” He says Pimco is diversifying away from US assets because of “unpredictability.”
Good. Let them leave. The financial class has been comfortable for too long. They built a system where they win no matter what happens to regular people. Now someone is finally making them uncomfortable, and they’re calling it “the end of American capital.”
You know what I call it? The end of American capital being controlled by people who don’t care about Americans.
Blain worries that Trump “failed to grasp” how criticizing Jamie Dimon “undermines the reasons for the success of the US.” But maybe Trump grasps something Blain doesn’t: that success built on an unaccountable financial elite isn’t success for most people. It’s success for Jamie Dimon.
I Used to Think Like Blain
Three years ago, I would have nodded along with every word of this column. I would have worried about “institutions” and “norms” and “the global perception of American credibility.” I was trained to worry about those things. That’s what good Democrats do.
Then I woke up. I realized that “institutions” meant whatever protected the people already in charge. “Norms” meant not questioning why credit card rates could be 25% while savings accounts pay 0.5%. “Credibility” meant making sure London bankers still felt comfortable investing here.
Blain ends his column warning about “the end of the American Century.” But the American Century he’s mourning is one where British financiers and Wall Street executives got rich while towns like the one I grew up in hollowed out.
If that’s ending, I’m not going to cry about it. And neither should you.
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