On July 25, 2013, a high-ranking federal law enforcement officer took a public stand against malfeasance on Wall Street. Preet Bharara, then the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, held a news conference to announce one of the largest Wall Street criminal cases the American justice system had ever seen.

Bharara’s office had just indicted the multibillion dollar hedge fund firm SAC Capital Advisors, charging it with wire fraud and insider trading. Standing before a row of television cameras, Bharara described the case in momentous terms, saying that it involved illegal trading that was “substantial, pervasive and on a scale without precedent in the history of hedge funds”.

His legal action that day, he assured the public, would send a strong message to the financial industry that cheating was not acceptable and that prosecutors and regulators would take swift action when behaviour crossed the line. Steven A. Cohen, the founder of SAC and one of the world’s wealthiest men, was never criminally charged, but his company would end up paying $1.8 billion in civil and criminal fines, one of the largest settlements of its kind.

He denied any culpability, but his reputation was still badly — some might argue irreparably — damaged. Eight of his former employees were charged by the government, and six pleaded guilty (a few later had their convictions or guilty pleas dismissed). Cohen was required to shut his fund down and was prohibited from managing outside investors’ money until 2018.

Now, with the prohibition having expired in December, Cohen has been raising money from investors and is set to start a new hedge fund. He’ll find himself in an environment very different from the one he last operated in. His resurrection arrives as Wall Street regulation is under assault and financiers are directing tax policy and other aspects of the economy — often to the benefit of their own industry.

Cohen is a powerful symbol of Wall Street’s resurgence under President Trump. As the stock market lurched through its stomach-turning swings over the past week, it was hard not to worry that Wall Street could once again torpedo an otherwise healthy economy and to think about how little Trump and his Congress have done to prepare for such a possibility.

Stock market turbulence typically prompts calls for smart and stringent financial regulation, which is not part of the Trump agenda. One of Trump’s first acts as president was to fire Bharara, who made prosecuting Wall Street crime one of his priorities. Trump has also given many gifts to people like Cohen.

On the presidential campaign trail, Trump made promises to help working-class Americans — the “forgotten men and women” who have seen their opportunities for meaningful economic advancement decline over the past two decades, even as those at the top of the economic ladder have become even wealthier. Once in office, he abandoned many of those promises.

Instead, he has placed the considerations of high finance at the top of his priorities, far exceeding what even his friends at big banks, hedge funds and private equity firms could have hoped for. The most potent evidence may be found in the handling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers against unfair practices by banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions.

Its first permanent director, the former Ohio attorney-general Richard Cordray, ran the agency aggressively, to the loud protest of the banking industry and its Republican allies in Congress. By the end of 2016, the bureau reported, it had recovered $12 billion for wronged consumers.

Most famously, it brought charges over some of the most egregious financial abuse in recent memory, fining Wells Fargo Bank $100 million after it was found to have created a high-pressure sales culture that drove employees to open up more than two million accounts that customers hadn’t asked for.

The bureau also, through civil lawsuits and new rules, went after the payday lending industry, with the aim of protecting low income borrowers from becoming trapped by ballooning debt. After Cordray’s departure in November, Trump replaced him with the White House budget director, Mick Mulvaney, who once described the agency as a “joke”.

Mulvaney immediately started cutting back its power. The agency must ask for new funding each quarter; its most recent request was for $0, which suggests that he intends to starve it of cash. There are other signs of Wall Street’s rising influence.

The new tax act passed by Trump’s party includes an array of benefits for the investor class. During the campaign, Trump promised to eliminate the “carried interest” loophole, which gives many hedge fund and private equity fund managers tax rates that are lower than those of most people who pay income tax.

He declared that hedge fund managers were “getting away with murder” through their extra-low taxes. Yet somehow, the loophole remained untouched by the Republican tax overhaul, which stunned even some of Trump’s conservative advisers.

Similarly, the tax plan promises its greatest tax cuts to corporations, with much of the benefit likely to flow to their shareholders. America’s largest banks, like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, are predicting billions of dollars of increased profits. Regulators who police the financial markets have been told in ways that are subtle and not so subtle to pull back on aggressive enforcement.

Republicans, with the help of some Democrats, are taking steps to weaken the Dodd-Frank Act, passed in 2010 with the intent of making the financial system safer and of discouraging certain kinds of risk-taking by banks and other financial firms. There were flaws in the legislation, to be sure.

But Republicans have been pledging to get rid of it almost from the moment it was passed, arguing that it was discouraging banks from making loans and choking small banks with unnecessary rules. Trump has said Dodd-Frank is a “disaster”, though he offered no evidence it was true.

Now the Senate appears to be on a path to passing a bill that would loosen the rules considerably and excuse most banks, aside from those with $250 billion or more in assets, from the restrictions. Into this environment comes Cohen, promising to generate dazzling profits for investors once again. Trump has lowered his taxes and lessened the chances that pesky market rules will hamper his appetite for taking risk.

During his money-management hiatus, Cohen spent time at his estates in Greenwich, Connecticut, and East Hampton, New York, and made eye-popping art acquisitions, dropping $141.3 million, including fees, on a Giacometti sculpture. In this anything-goes-on-Wall-Street Trump era, why shouldn’t he manage your money as well?

— New York Times News Service