Jul 16, 2010 Posted by admin on Jul 16, 2010 in News | 0 comments

Financial Reform: How Wall Street Will Outsmart Congress – The Daily Beast

The Senate voted 60 to 38 on Thursday to close debate on financial reform, setting up a final vote on the legislation later in the day. The “yea” column includes three Republicans, who chose to break their party’s filibuster: Senators Susan Colllins, Olympia Snowe, and Scott Brown; meanwhile, Democrat Russ Feingold voted against the measure, saying that it was too weak. Once the Senate passes the bill this afternoon, it will go to President Obama’s desk. He’s expected to sign it within days. Randall Lane, author of The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane, reveals how Wall Street is already planning to get around the new rules.

At a recent lunch with a former financial regulator who now has a big job at a big bank, the topic turned to the financial reform bill Congress seems poised to pass Thursday. “The market,” this human Washington-Wall Street nexus told me with a sly smile, “is always four years ahead of the regulators.”

And that calendar, like the stock options of too many corporate scoundrels, apparently gets back-dated. Calling around Wall Street this week, I got the sense that the powers that be—and their accountants and lawyers—had been hard at work trying to end-run Wall Street reform before it even passed.

Since none of the dozen or so people I spoke with—and virtually no one else in America—has read all 2,000-plus pages of the windily named Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, let’s consider this soon-to-be law in three mental buckets.

via Financial Reform: How Wall Street Will Outsmart Congress – The Daily Beast.