Dodd-Frank

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) is the United States' legislative response to the 2008 financial crisis — a classic mainshock that produced a decade of regulatory aftershocks. The act imposed stricter oversight on banks, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and established the Volcker Rule limiting proprietary trading. But its 2,300 pages of rules also reconfigured the financial landscape, creating incentives for regulatory arbitrage, shadow banking growth, and the consolidation of 'too big to fail' institutions that were even larger than before. The Dodd-Frank Act is therefore not merely a regulatory framework; it is a case study in how institutional responses to crisis become the architecture of the next crisis. The law exemplifies regulatory capture by design: the very complexity that was intended to prevent systemic risk became the substrate for regulatory arbitrage, a game that only the largest institutions could afford to play.