“Five years ago today, Barack Obama signed one of the most important but least understood bills of his presidency: the Dodd-Frank financial regulation overhaul, which represents his main response to the enormous financial crisis that arrived immediately before his election. The law has many detractors and few fans. Pundits argue that it either suffocates the biggest banks with red tape or did nothing to change anything; that it is either a complete takeover of the financial sector or a series of things with no overall logic whatsoever.”

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“So many of the problems we saw in the derivatives market stemmed from a bad structure. They traded behind closed doors, through a handful of dealers, with very little oversight,” Caitlin Kline of the financial reform think tank Better Markets told me. “Under Dodd Frank, derivatives will now have the basic transparency and risk mechanisms of other financial markets, which is meaningful and long overdue.”

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Read the full Vox article by Mike Konczal here.