In July, Congress passed the “Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010,” promising to restore trust to the nation’s battered financial system. As President Obama put it, the bill will “protect consumers and lay the foundation for a stronger and safer financial system, one that is innovative, creative, competitive, and far less prone to panic and collapse.”
Having declared “Mission Accomplished,” Obama and his congressional allies turned the massive, 2,319-page legislation over to the bureaucracy to interpret. The financial industry promptly shifted from conventional warfare over the shape of the law to a drawn-out insurgency to influence the regulations that spell out how it will be implemented. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “Having failed to block financial reform, Wall Street is now focused on the next best thing: ensuring that the law is loosely interpreted and weakly enforced.”
