Financial Risk Manager

With a broad smile and the stroke of a pen, President Barack Obama on Wednesday capped a contentious 18-month struggle and signed into law the broadest revamp of financial regulation since the Great Depression.

"Passing this bill was no easy task. To get there, we had to overcome the furious lobbying of an array of powerful interest groups and a partisan minority determined to block change," Obama said in a pre-signing speech, surrounded by cheering congressional leaders and administration members.

Alternating between hitting Wall Street and acknowledging its economic importance, the president said that the historic Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 seeks to strike a balance that would protect consumers while allowing the vital financial sector to prosper. "The fact is the financial industry is central to our nation's ability to grow, to prosper, to compete and to innovate. This reform will foster innovation, not hamper it. It is designed to make sure that everybody follows the same set of rules," he said. "Unless your business model depends on cutting corners or bilking customers, you've got nothing to fear from reform."

The signing marked the third major legislative accomplishment for Obama, after an $800 billion stimulus and tax-cut package and a regulatory revamp of the health care sector. Still, the president has slumped in the opinion polls, dragged down by a sluggish economy. Polls also suggest that the broader public is ambivalent about the new measure. To combat that, Obama and congressional Democrats went to extremes to highlight all the consumer provisions in the legislation. There are numerous measures to combat predatory lending, and the president invited borrower Robin Fox of Rome, Ga., to the speech. She'd been hit with unexpected interest rate increases on a credit card balance.

"With this law, unfair rate hikes, like the one that hit Robin, will end for good," Obama said. Underscoring the historic nature of the legislation, which updates many rules that date to the 1930s, the televised signing ceremony wasn't at the White House but at the Ronald Reagan Building, in a large auditorium where about 400 invited guests could bask in the accomplishment. The heads of big Wall Street banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs were noticeably absent from the list of invitees. The CEOs of Citibank and Bank of America, which received a large part of taxpayer bailout money, were invited, however. The legislation seeks to fix much of what went wrong in the lead-up to the nation's deep financial crisis. It gives regulators the power to dissolve large, interconnected financial institutions and allows the Federal Reserve to break up companies that it thinks are so large that their failure would pose a risk to the U.S. and global economy.