It’s almost a year since Barack Obama signed the “strongest consumer financial protections in history.” Thanks to the Dodd-Frank bill, drawn up in the aftermath of the worst financial crisis in living memory, America “would never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes,” the US president declared, back in July 2010.
A year later Dodd-Frank is looking less historic. Of the 380 rules that were supposed to have been written for the bill by the end of next month, only 30 have been finalised. And the biggest most contentious areas, including the regulation of derivatives and what makes an entity “too big to fail,” remain in flux. Regulatory experts don’t expect any resolution before mid-2012 and many expect a watered down bill to be further diluted by furious lobbying from an increasingly confident Wall Street.
Categories: Law