Regulation for the Future

How does government regulate for the future?

Big Think sat down with Former U.S. Representative Barney Frank at Exponential Finance, presented by Singularity University & CNBC to discuss this idea. Frank of course was the champion of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was passed in 2010 in response to the Great Recession.

In this exclusive interview, he explains the history of financial regulation in the U.S. and how it has always had to keep up with new innovations. “So what happened in the ’80s, ’90s and into the turn of the 21st-century was a lot of innovations that had no rules,” he says. “What we did in the Financial Reform Bill was to create new rules, and I believe we now have a fairly good set of rules for the current situation.”

Are we prepared for the next great craze produced by quants, those rocket scientists of Wall Street? “The next issue is okay, what do we look out for? The answer is we don’t know what to look out for because we don’t know what the innovations will be of the future,” he says. 

In this clip from Big Think’s interview, Frank sheds light on how the Financial Reform Bill helped prepare the government to better react to innovative shifts on Wall Street that threaten the economy.