The Financial Reform Bill

The Senate passed its financial reform bill toward the end of last week, making it very likely that some form of this legislation will soon become the law of the land. Over the next few days, we'll take a look at some of the provisions that the Senate passed and talk about how they might affect your own financial life.

First of all, here's what's going to happen next: Since the Senate bill was different from the one the House of Representatives had passed back in December, a House-Senate committee will now hammer out a compromise bill somewhere between the two. President Obama is said to want a compromise bill to sign by July 4th. If the recent health-care bill is any indication, the final bill will likely be closer to the Senate's version than the House's.

Much of the bill is concerned with the banking sector and derivatives trading and "Too Big to Fail" concerns, which won't likely have any direct impact on financial consumers. But there are some consumer items as well, such as forcing institutions to retain some of the risk from complex mortgage-backed securities, rather than pushing all that risk into the investors' hands. (That may not sound like a consumer issue, but many of these products ended up in the hands of unwary pension funds and the like during the housing bubble.) We'll take a closer look at some of these provisions during the upcoming week.