Wall Street lobby shifts to regulatory process

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate's approval of financial reform is the starting gun for a new intensive Wall Street lobbying campaign aimed at regulators who must now translate the legislation into hard and fast rules.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, approved by Congress on Thursday, is the most sweeping overhaul of U.S. financial regulation since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

But how onerous the industry finds its provisions will depend importantly on actions by the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and other agencies that will have to write hundreds of new rules and regulations to implement the legislation.

"The legislation leaves many policy issues to the regulators to decide, almost turning the regulatory process into a virtual extension of the legislative process," said Micah Green, a partner at leading lobbying firm Patton Boggs.

That has revived the financial industry's battered hopes of weakening a range of key provisions in the arcane regulatory world, where the deliberations are largely divorced from the intense public scrutiny and election-year pressures that worked against Wall Street in Congress.