Mike Piwowar, Republican chief economist of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, drew a crowd that nearly filled the Stark Lecture Hall in Gerdin Business Building on Friday, Nov. 9, to discuss the effects of the Dodd-Frank Law on the economy.

“It is the most comprehensive law that affects the financial services industry that many students could end up working for in this area,” Piwowar said.

With the financial crisis in 2008, Piwowar believed it was clear the laws governing the financial services industry needed to be changed in a very serious way. The Obama Administration took over in January 2009.

“The world was sort of in turmoil; the crisis went on for several months,”  Piwowar said. “The Obama administration became very serious about ‘what are we going to do?’”

The Democratic Party delivered some draft legislation to the Senate during August 2009. A year later, the Dodd-Frank was signed into law.

The Great Depression ended around 1929 and the United States didn’t have major legislation until 1933. The response back then was an approach to discreetly deal with issues in the market.

“Dodd-Frank is a different approach,” Piwowar said. “They want to get it all done at once.”

Although claiming a desire to change up financial regulations “at once,” only one-third of the regulations have been finalized, meaning two-thirds of the rules under the Dodd-Frank Act has not even been processed since the two years the act was passed.

The Dodd-Frank Act is 2,319 pages long and asks that 20 different regulatory agencies adopt over 300 new rules and regulations.

“Prior to Dodd-Frank, on the consumer protection side as a retail investor, you were protected by the Securities and Exchange Commission [when] buying stocks and bonds. On the financing side: when you went to borrow money, there was no single place in the government that actually handled that regulation: It was spread out across a number of different agencies,” Piwowar said. “There was this idea that maybe we should consolidate this regulation all in one place.”

As for the future with the act, Piwowar said it’s very slow and the chance of actually enacting legislation is unforeseeable.

Piwowar said he looks at the situation from the economist’s point of view, coming to the realization that the Dodd-Frank Act is painfully complicated and slow-moving for America’s economy.

“There are three groups of people in the world,” Piwowar said. “Optimists, pessimists and economists. Optimists look at the glass half full; pessimists see a glass that’s half empty; and economists see a glass that’s twice as large as it should be.”