“What is 20 times taller than the Statue of Liberty, 15 times longer than “Moby Dick” and would take the average reader more than a month to read, even if you hunkered down with it for 40 hours a week?”
If you’ve been Dodd-Frank’ed, you know the answer.
The last round of financial overhaul was the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that came out of the Enron scandal. SOx weighs in at 66 pages. Dodd-Frank eats that for breakfast; It’s in heavyweight class at 849 pages.
That is just the legislation. Dodd-Frank put a big burden on financial regulators to work out the details to implement their vision (as myopic as it may be at times).
“In addition to the 30 rule-making procedures that already have missed the deadline set by Congress, 145 are supposed to be completed by year end…. Officials at the SEC, on the hook for more Dodd-Frank-related regulations than any other U.S. agency, have finished six rules, proposed 28 additional rules, missed deadlines on 11—and still have 50 to go, on which they have yet to issue any proposals.”
So far the regulatory “process has produced more than three million words in the Federal Register—or more than 3,500 11-inch-high pages.” And almost 2/3 of the rules required by Dodd-Frank have not even been proposed.
Congressman Barney Frank thinks missing the deadlines is no a big deal. “There is no penalty for not meeting the deadline,” Mr. Frank said during a webinar sponsored by the National LGBT Bar Association. “There’s no gun at their heads. Nobody gets fired.”
Sources:
- Overhaul Grows and Slows by Jean Eaglesham in the Wall Street Journal
- Dodd-Frank Rulemaking Progress Report (.pdf) by Davis Polk
- No gun at regulators’ heads to hit Dodd-Frank deadlines: Barney Frank by Mark Schoeff Jr. in Investment News