Wall Street shudders as Trump muses

New York

FOR a brief moment, Wall Street stopped on Monday, as if time was suspended in an alternative reality.

President Donald Trump, for the first time as resident of the White House, said aloud that he was considering breaking up the nation's biggest banks. Of course, he had said it on the campaign trail, but this seemed different.

"I'm looking at that right now," Mr Trump told Bloomberg News during an interview in the Oval Office. "There's some people that want to go back to the old system, right? So we're going to look at that."

The headline ricocheted around the e-mail boxes of senior bank executives across the industry. At the Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles, where Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had just finished speaking - and didn't mention breaking up the banks - the hallways quickly buzz…