Damian Paletta

But there was a decision made at the end to call it the Dodd-Frank Act.

And that was when it kind of cemented that his name would be on a historic piece of legislation.

It aimed to take risk out of the financial system.

One of the goals was to make it harder for banks to become too big to fail and in the future to prevent there from being a government bailout and putting taxpayers on the hook.

And it wanted to create a system where if a company got out over its skis, a bank, that it would be able to fail in a contained way, in a way that didn't cause kind of a domino effect.

Huge, huge deal.

I mean, for the Obama administration, I think this and the Affordable Care Act were two of the most consequential pieces of legislation that Obama passed.

This was the answer for the left to the financial crisis.

This was their way of saying never again.

And so it took a Herculean effort by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and others to get this through.

There were so many times when this bill almost died.

Sure.

So one of the biggest moments is in the first Trump administration, he put Mick Mulvaney, who at the time was his, I think at the time he was either his chief of staff or his budget director.

Mulvaney had a bunch of jobs.

He put Mick Mulvaney in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

And essentially, I think the message to people was, OK, I'm going to put Trump hated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and so did Mick Mulvaney.

Here's Mulvaney at the time.

— He's going to put Mick Mulvaney in charge of it, which means this thing is no longer going to be doing a lot of the consumer enforcement that it had been doing before.

And it has not lived up to the dreams that Democrats had for it originally.

I think the supporters of this law would say that one of the reasons there has not been a financial crisis is because this law exists and because the regulators have the power and that prevents banks and others from getting out of control and doing crazy things.