According to information at Wikipedia.com, ''the Act is categorized into sixteen titles and by one law firm's count, it requires that regulators create 243 rules, conduct 67 studies, and issue 22 periodic reports.''
If that's not enough to make your head hurt, consider that the government, according to the article, has met less than fifteen percent of the 2,300 page tiger by the tail's rule requirements mandated by the act. Per the article, legal and regulatory watchdogs Davis Polk and Wardwell report that ''regulators missed 131 deadlines over the past year.''
(Scratch head here.)
The objective of the legislation, per Wikipedia.com:
''To promote the financial stability of the United States by improving accountability and transparency in the financial system, to end ‘too big to fail', to protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts, to protect consumers from abusive financial services practices…''
Great in theory. In practice? Per the article, snippets of the ‘to do list' for Dodd-Frank include the following action items:
''Section 342: Create and staff Office of Minority and Women Inclusion (pending reprogramming approval by appropriators).
Section 911: Create new Investor Advisory Committee (pending appointment of Investor Advocate).
Section 919: Issue rules, as the Commission deems appropriate, designating documents or information that must be provided by a broker or dealer to a retail investor before the purchase of an investment product or service.''
And so on and so forth, ad nauseam.
Per the article, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that the government will need over $1 billion for nearly a dozen different agencies to fund the act's provisions by 2012. That includes a whopping $480 million for the shiny new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
This, as lawmakers attempt to negotiate a deal for Congress to raise the U.S. government's $14.3 trillion borrowing limit by the fast approaching August 2nd deadline so as to avoid a debt default.
Per the article, law firm Morrison and Foerster LLP was quoted as saying in the financial adviser publication Investment News that the act's regulations ''do not address or resolve the core systemic risk issues in the act.'' In addition, ''with elections coming up, and with international reform measures dragging along, one cannot help but wonder how, when or even if many of the act's reforms will be put in place.''
In addition, one cannot help but wonder if perhaps the next step will be to reform the Dodd Frank Act itself, in what might well be described as the newly added tenth circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno.
