As one would expect of a piece of legislation that has sixteen titles and runs 849 pages in the Statutes at Large, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act ranges widely in addressing problems both directly and indirectly associated with the financial crisis. Taken as a whole, though, the primary aim of those 849 pages can fairly be read as a reorientation of financial regulation towards safeguarding “financial stability” through the containment of “systemic risk,” phrases that both recur dozens of times throughout the statute. The law, explicitly in many provisions and implicitly in many others, directs the bank regulatory agencies to broaden their focus beyond the soundness of individual banking institutions, and the market regulatory agencies to move beyond their traditional focus on transaction-based investor protection.

This emphasis on financial stability and systemic risk is hardly surprising in light of the damage done by the financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession, from which we continue to recover only slowly. Indeed, concern about financial stability and systemic risk has at times been a crucial impetus for financial reform in the United States. Much of the New Deal legislation that defined the financial regulatory structure for more than 40 years was in direct response to what we would today call systemic concerns, including banking panics and excessive leverage in equity markets. Twenty years before the New Deal, the creation of the Federal Reserve had been intended at least as much as a financial stability measure as an instrument of monetary policy.

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