Celebrating a fourth birthday and growing nicely. That’s the story of the Dodd-Frank law, designed to end a “too big to fail” banking system that forced taxpayers to bail out bankers who took not only their own banks but the entire financial system to the verge of collapse, and brought on a record recession. Dodd-Frank, which weighed in at over 2,000 pages at birth, has since put on 14,000 pages of implementing regulations, with more to come. Lawyers here in Washington, as always the big winners when the politicians decide to fix something, estimate that the delicious regulation-writing is only half done, and that it will be five-to-ten years before all the required 400+ rules are in place. Enough fees to fund the college education of their children and, with luck, their grandchildren.

Still to come are rules requiring greater transparency for complicated transactions, and tougher rules to govern the credit rating agencies that splashed AAA ratings on duff securities, and still earn their fees from issuers only if their ratings are high enough to allow the transactions to proceed. The SEC has already notified S&P that it might face fraud charges in connection with some of the credit ratings it issued in 2011.