By Milana Vinn, Echo Wang and Nupur Anand

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Wall Street executives cheered the prospect of business-friendly regulations and a burst of deals as they analyzed the implications of Donald Trump’s reelection, although some felt uneasy about his unpredictability.

Trump’s return to power is likely to significantly ease some regulatory pressures under the Biden administration, executives across banks and private equity said.

Smaller government, broad deregulation and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy are widely expected. In particular, a softer antitrust stance and less regulation in areas such as banking and cryptocurrencies could boost corporate profits and spur deal flow, they said.

“He is pro-business and anti-regulation,” said Euan Rellie, co-founder and managing partner of investment bank BDA Partners. “His instincts are to cut taxes. All of that will help the M&A market.”

“So long as he governs with moderation and not with chaos, the markets will welcome him,” said Rellie.

However, some executives said that was not a given.

Some bankers worried about how to navigate unpredictable shifts in government policy, the impact of trade tariffs, a potentially perilous fiscal path that adds trillions of dollars to the national debt and the potential tightening of visa programs.

For now, though, the reaction was euphoric. As U.S. stocks rallied sharply, one equity capital markets banker who declined to be named said his colleagues got fresh mandates Wednesday morning and an opportunity to pitch for an initial public offering. The message was, “Let’s get the ball rolling,” the banker said.

An investment banker at a global firm in New York also said his firm had an internal call to discuss deals, including possibly revisiting some transactions that may have not passed regulatory scrutiny under Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission in the Biden administration.

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A more lenient approach to antitrust issues could boost dealmaking in many sectors. Two sources with knowledge of the media industry said the sector was in for two years of consolidation.

Greg Hertrich, head of U.S. depository strategies at Nomura, projected more banking mergers. “The current number of 4,700 banks in the U.S. may be reduced to around 2,500 faster,” he said.

Large financial deals will have more chance of being greenlighted. Shares of payments firms Capital One (NYSE:) and Discover Financial Services (NYSE:), awaiting approval of a $35.3 billion deal, surged after Trump was elected.

“It is expected that the Trump administration will be more open to sensible M&As than many believe has been the case under the Biden administration,” said Gene Ludwig, a former top bank regulator who advises financial institutions as CEO of Ludwig Advisors.

For banks, one of the biggest questions is how stringent new Basel capital standards will be.

Raymond (NS:) James analyst Ed Mills said the turnover of regulators as the new administration comes in will “stall the bank regulatory super cycle that has existed over the last couple of years.”

“We are unlikely to see any major bank regulation come out and all of this paints a very favorable picture for the banks,” said Mills.

Expectations of an easier regulatory path for banks under Trump have buoyed their shares. The KBW Index, which tracks large-cap banks, closed almost 11% higher on Wednesday but fell back 2% on Thursday.

MANY WORRIES

Not everyone was celebrating, however. A lawyer who works with renewable energy companies said he had been on the phone with despondent clients all day. They were all trying to reach local Republican politicians in districts where they have planned projects, seeking assurances that tax credits and incentives under Biden’s push for green energy would continue.

At one Wall Street firm, a meeting included discussions about the risk of deficits rising under a Trump administration, one source said. One estimate is for his policies to add $7.5 trillion to deficits over 10 years.

The participants hoped Trump’s aides would encourage him not to go to extremes with tariffs and tax cuts, said the source.

Other concerns were more personal, such as safeguarding non-U.S. staff. In Trump’s first term, he took steps to tighten access to some visa programs, including suspending many work visas during the COVID pandemic.

A private equity investor in New York said international employees on H-1B visas were wondering on Wednesday whether they would have trouble renewing their visas and how their employer could support them.

By Nate Raymond (NS:)

(Reuters) – Republican President-elect Donald Trump is poised to build on his legacy of reshaping the federal judiciary with nominees who his allies and opponents predict could be even more conservative than the near-record 234 judges he put on the bench in his first stint in office.

With Republicans set to take back control of the Senate, which must confirm judicial nominees, Trump should enjoy an easy path to filling possible vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court and the expected 100-plus seats that will likely open up on lower courts across the nation.

“Trump remade the federal judiciary in his first term, and now he has the opportunity to cement that vision for an entire generation,” John Collins, a professor at George Washington University Law School, said in an email.

A new round of Trump-appointed, life-tenured judges would result in a more conservative federal judiciary that would be more likely to cast a skeptical eye on environmental, financial and other regulations and to uphold Trump’s agenda in the face of legal challenges.

Representatives for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

During his first four years in office, Trump’s 234 judicial appointments included three U.S. Supreme Court justices, giving the high court its 6-3 conservative majority, and 54 judges named to 13 intermediate appeals courts. It marked the second-most judicial appointments of any president in a single term.

Those appointments shifted the judiciary to the right, with Republican appointees today making up half of all active appellate judges and having majorities on six circuit courts. Many had connections to the influential conservative legal group the Federalist Society and remain active with the organization.

Those judges often embrace “originalism,” a legal philosophy that seeks to interpret the U.S. Constitution based on the text as understood at the time of its drafting in the 18th century.

That legal doctrine has formed the backbone of a series of rulings favoring conservative litigants in cases that have curtailed abortion access, expanded gun rights and limited government regulation.

While Trump in his first term from 2017 to 2020 turned to the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo as an adviser on judicial nominees, the Republican this time has surrounded himself with different conservative allies focused on judicial nominees.

Those include Mike Davis, a Trump ally and founder of the conservative judicial advocacy group Article III Project, who during Trump’s first term was chief counsel for nominations to the then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, who is set to resume that role.

‘BOLD AND FEARLESS JUDGES’

“I think that Trump’s biggest and most consequential accomplishment of his first term was the transformation of the federal judiciary, and I hope he builds upon that in his second term with even more bold and fearless judges,” Davis told Reuters in the run-up to Tuesday’s election.

Davis, who had worked to help confirm Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, posted on social media platform X on Thursday that anyone wanting his help landing a job during Trump’s presidency needed to provide “concrete evidence of your loyalty to Trump.”

Some of Trump’s appointees to the trial courts in his first term could be potential candidates to fill vacancies on key appeals courts, which often have the last word on cases given how few appeals the Supreme Court hears.

Davis has previously cited Florida-based U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who dismissed the classified documents criminal case against the now-incoming president, as the type of “fearless” judge Trump should seek to appoint.

Other prominent conservative trial court judges who could be eligible for a promotion include U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, who suspended approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. The U.S. Supreme Court in June preserved access to the pill, overturning an appellate court ruling that partly upheld Kacsmaryk’s decision.

Another rising star among conservative judges is U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a Trump appointee in Tampa, Florida, best known for declaring the Biden administration’s COVID-19 mask mandate for airlines and other public transportation was unlawful.

The scope of Trump’s ability to further reshape the judiciary will be limited by the number of vacancies he can fill.

He inherited 108 federal judicial vacancies when he took office in 2017, the most for an incoming president since Democratic then-President Bill Clinton in 1992.

Today, the federal judiciary has 47 seats currently vacant and 20 more that are expected to open up in the future, assuming their current occupants keep to their announced plans to move into semi-retirement. But outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden has nominees pending to fill 28 of those 67 seats.

Another 247 judges will be eligible to move into semi-retirement over the next four years, opening new vacancies, according to an analysis by the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal group.

But only 116 were appointed by Republicans, and research has shown that the vast majority of judges today time their decisions to take “senior status” to when the White House is occupied by a president of the same party as the one who appointed them.

Even with fewer vacancies, though, law school professor Collins said Trump “will likely be able to both lock in conservative majorities for the foreseeable future on some courts and narrow or flip liberal majorities on others.”