Roosevelt Institute, August 1, 2024, The End Of Banking History? Finishing The Unfinished Business Of Financial Reform
These are not the only items on the financial reform agenda. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection (Dodd-Frank) Act contained more than 300 provisions that either expressly required or permitted agency rulemaking (Copeland 2010). As of 2016, the previous high-water mark for implementation, 70.3 percent of the required rulemakings had been finalized, 9.2 percent were in the proposal stage, and 20.5 percent had not yet been proposed (Davis Polk 2016). For example, regulators still need to finalize incentive-based compensation rules required under section 956 of the Dodd-Frank Act (FDIC et al. 2024).1 Regulators are also overdue in updating the federal guidelines applicable to bank mergers to address growing consolidation and financial stability risks (EO 14036; FDIC 2024a)
To be sure, there have been areas of progress, including the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) work on the risks to investors posed by climate change and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) initiative to address excessive “junk fees” like credit card late fees (SEC 2024; CFPB 2024).2 These efforts have progressed because they benefited from a combination of single-agency rulemaking jurisdiction, political guidance from the White House and its administration, and an overarching affirmative economic vision into which they can fit.3
