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Minimum Competence · Jul 21, 2026 · 6m

This Day in Legal History: The Dodd-Frank Act

On July 21, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the most sweeping overhaul of American financial regulation since the New Deal. It was a direct response to the 2008 financial crisis—the collapse that wiped out trillions in household wealth, toppled storied institutions like Lehman Brothers, and required massive taxpayer bailouts to keep the banking system from failing entirely.

Dodd-Frank tried to attack the crisis’s root causes on several fronts at once. It created the Financial…