Regulating Wall Street

T he Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 is everywhere described as the most ambitious and far-reaching overhaul of financial regulation since the 1930s. The Act was born of the severe financial crisis of 2007-2009 and the Great Recession that followed. It attempts to fix parts of the financial architecture that failed in the crisis. The Act is already being denounced by some for not going far enough to curb the risky behavior of financial institutions, and condemned by others for going too far and hampering innovation and efficiency in financial markets. Following Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System, a forensic analysis of the financial crisis of 2007-2009, forty NYU Stern faculty have produced this in-depth analysis of the Dodd-Frank Act. It provides a comprehensive description of the important parts of the Act and a balanced assessment of its likely success as the new regulatory architecture for the financial system. The Dodd-Frank Act, together with other regulatory reforms introduced by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Reserve, and other regulators as well as financial sector reforms being put in place in Europe, is going to alter the structure of financial markets in profound ways. The editors argue that the Dodd-Frank Act provides much-needed improvements in financial regulation but falls far short of what could have been achieved. Today, it seems that everyone's taking credit for predicting the near collapse of America's financial system that started in 2007. But, rather than looking to the past at what went wrong and who was right, in Regulating Wall Street: The Dodd-Frank Act and the New Architecture of Global Finance, leading academics from New York University's Stern School of Business-each a specialist in a relevant discipline-turn their attentions to the new legislation to regulate Wall Street in the future, and whether the resulting regulations will promote growth and prevent another near collapse of our financial system, or contribute to its catastrophic failure. Edited by Viral Acharya, Thomas Cooley, Matthew Richardson, and Ingo Walter, this book is essential reading for policymakers, business executives, and anyone who can benefit from having a clear, coherent, and rigorous framework for thinking about the future of global finance.