One Step Forward, Two Steps Back? The Institutional Structure of U.S. Financial Services Regulation after the Crisis of 2008

This book chapter provides an overview of the key changes in the structure of U.S. financial services regulation in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008. The crisis exposed numerous weaknesses in the U.S. system of regulatory oversight of the country’s rapidly growing and complex financial services sector. In response, the U.S. Congress adopted the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (the Dodd-Frank Act), a wide-ranging reform statute that explicitly pursues the objective of systemic risk mitigation. Among other things, this large-scale reform effort involved a rearrangement of the federal administrative apparatus in charge of overseeing the U.S. financial services sector.