Wall Street has always faced pressure for change after its misdeeds bring the financial system and the broader economy to the precipice—or over it. But our success in securing durable change has varied wildly. Now is the time to improve the odds by ensuring that the spirit of a revived antimonopoly movement and its emphasis on structuring competitive markets animate our response to the next financial collapse.

The last 100 years have brought us the Great Depression that began with the 1929 stock market crash and the 2008 global financial crisis, which kicked into high gear when Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. Two attempts to meet the challenge of these self-inflicted crises of capitalism followed: the New Deal and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

One of those frameworks, built around the idea of structuring incentives to promote competition, contributed to an unprecedented, decades-long, broad-based prosperity. One of them neutralized finance in a political sense—Wall Street no longer held the whip hand on policy—and in an economic sense, as banking became a boring profession that served industry and consumers, not the other way around. One of them diffused power within the financial sector, resting on the conviction that only overhauling and downsizing finance would force the industry to supply the real economy with credit on reasonable terms. In short, one of those projects was a resounding success.

The other was Dodd-Frank.

Despite facing a similarly grave financial crisis as in the 1930s—one also accompanied by massive increases in wealth and income inequality—the United States passed Dodd-Frank and called it a day. The law has not proved an inflection point in history in the way we think of the New Deal. It made no lasting impact on the trajectory or influence of finance, nor did it catalyze a series of reforms. Dodd-Frank’s passage proved to be, in the notorious words of an artlessly honest bank lobbyist, “halftime.”

Wall Street, with the open assistance of the Obama Administration and many Democrats, defeated moves in Congress toward root-and-branch restructuring of the financial system. The industry then settled in for a 15-year campaign to slow, stall, or water down the law’s incremental reforms, culminating in the second Trump Administration’s scorched-earth approach.

Dodd-Frank failed to bend the curve away from our steady march toward financialization: The financial sector makes up about 8 percent of our $32 trillion GDP, or about triple the average of the years immediately after World War II. We have an economy that responds to the imperatives of Wall Street—the group of firms that dominate different sectors of finance—rather than people’s desire to lead dignified lives with reasonable material comfort in a meaningfully democratic society. Finance has overwhelmed the rest of the economy to the point where it’s the water in which we swim, seldom noticed because it is so ubiquitous.

Unfortunately, the abundant “Project 2029s” for the next Democratic administration show signs of weakness. One “bold economic program” on offer rehashes ideas from Dodd-Frank built around supervision and regulation. But these approaches have already demonstrably failed—often in a policy sense and almost always in a political one. We must avoid misguided thinking about reviving Dodd-Frank and instead grapple directly with the Obama Administration’s shortcomings, which carried over into the Biden years.

When the next crisis comes—and it always does—we must embrace the antimonopoly spirit that has animated American debates about finance for more than 250 years, one that emphasizes the importance of decentralized financial power in fortifying democracy and creating competitive markets. Dodd-Frank, by abjuring structural change, stands out as a glaring exception in a country that has, in every period of reform, put finance at the center of antimonopoly thinking and vice versa. The idea that we should all have to compete, and that sheer size and power should not determine success, remains etched into the national psyche. Americans also harbor a particular disdain for Wall Street, or what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “financial monopoly.”

Bipartisanship on monopoly issues and public distaste for Wall Street can drive the tougher reform we will need. The Trump Administration’s openly corrupt abandonment of antitrust enforcement should not obscure the bipartisan support for tackling market concentration. There are already proposals in Congress in different spheres, including finance, that register support from both parties. Wall Street polls badly across partisan lines. If you fancy yourself a realist and scoff at the successes of the antimonopoly movement so far, try facing reality: It might not be bearing a ton of fruit right now, but this tree is growing and nurturing future champions.

The Failures of Dodd-Frank

Passed in 2010, Dodd-Frank’s sprawl defies easy summation. It created a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). It mandated new regulations on housing finance, the core issue in the 2008 crisis. It included the Volcker Rule, which prohibited deposit-taking banks from trading for their own profit. It directed regulators to create tests to measure the resilience of banks and procedures for winding them down in a crisis. It mapped out higher capital rules for banks to improve their ability to handle unexpected losses. It sought to bring parts of the complex derivatives market onto public exchanges. The bill’s authors envisioned that, together, these provisions would make the financial system more stable, less focused on casino-like activities on Wall Street, and fairer for consumers.

As a package, Dodd-Frank looked imposing enough, but its breadth obscured a fatal weakness. In taking what was, at its core, a technocratic approach, the law fortified the bureaucratic discretion to regulate rather than creating an industry obligation to restructure, which immediately tilted the playing field in Wall Street’s favor. The regulatory process created opportunities for lobbying on virtually every issue—a second bite at the apple. Time worked in the industry’s favor. And Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware saw it coming. “Chastened regulators may try in the coming years to be harder on the megabanks,” he said in a meticulously argued cri de coeur on the Senate floor before Dodd-Frank passed. “But even if they do, history has shown us that the tango will reach the end of the dance floor, and the big banks will execute the turn and lead again.”

The moment Wall Street won the key fight in Dodd-Frank, in May 2010, was an anticlimax. Twenty-seven Democrats, backed by the Obama Administration, joined almost every Republican in voting to preserve Wall Street’s prerogative to grow without limits by defeating an effort by Kaufman and fellow Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown to add a provision limiting the size of banks.

After passage, the regulation-writing phase of Dodd-Frank commenced, and the bank lobby went to work. Jamie Dimon, the longtime CEO of JPMorgan Chase, speaks of government relations as the bank’s “seventh line of business,” and it showed. The industry mounted a multilayered defense, sometimes fighting the regulatory pressure with a blizzard of complicated arguments from well-paid lawyers, other times taking agencies directly to court to stop regulations, even when congressional intent was crystal clear. At the same time, the banking industry bankrolled lawmakers who kept regulators, especially at the CFPB, under political siege for the duration of the Obama Administration. Chumminess with regulators, the revolving door, and Wall Street money in politics did the rest.

And, because the Brown-Kaufman provision didn’t make it into the final bill, banks have since exploded in size. JPMorgan Chase grew to have a market value the size of the next three banks on the size chart combined. The ten largest banks comprise over half of all banking assets, and the number of smaller banks has continued its decline, from about 7,500 in 2010 to roughly 4,000 last year. Bank consolidation has accelerated rural distress by limiting access to credit, siphoning off local capital, and curtailing household access to financial services. And fewer banks generally means fewer financial services for Black and brown neighborhoods.

Large banks now benefit from the well-known subsidy that accrues to institutions the government will inevitably bail out (the “too big to fail” problem), giving them an advantage over smaller banks. And they are bad for consumers. The larger the bank, the less interest they pay on deposits, and the more interest customers must pay them on credit cards.

Bailouts have continued. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) spent down $16.3 billion of the deposit insurance fund to handle a banking crisis in 2023, one that would have spread absent federal guarantees. Various Fed refinancing programs provided hundreds of billions in subsidies to Wall Street during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, the nonbank sector (private equity, hedge funds, asset managers) has exploded in size since Dodd-Frank, with assets of $85.7 trillion in 2023, nearly three times the total assets of traditional banks. The Dodd-Frank response to nonbanks, also known as “shadow banks,” obscured the lack of concrete results with bureaucratic churn: a multiagency oversight council led by the Treasury Department. The asset manager BlackRock went to war early to stop that council from targeting its size and importance and then provided several appointees to the Biden Administration. As Treasury secretary under President Biden, Janet Yellen openly abandoned the effort to police individual firms, the council’s main instrument of oversight.

Under Dodd-Frank, the largest banks had to write “living wills” that mapped out how their businesses could be wound down without endangering the broader banking system. During her tenure as Fed chair, Janet Yellen never forced the divestitures required by law even though she tacitly admitted the megabank plans looked unrealistic. The Fed never compelled Wells Fargo to downsize, despite a scandal-ridden decade that defined “too big to manage,” the idea that no CEO can plausibly administer a megabank effectively over the long term without violating the law or the bank collapsing. The bank lobby won a decade-long effort to grind down stress tests, an approach to the “too big to fail” dilemma that Timothy Geithner, Treasury secretary in Barack Obama’s first term, later conceded was a failure. Jerome Powell, as Fed chair, simply refused to write a Dodd-Frank regulation limiting executive pay. The Volcker Rule, designed to curb casino-like speculation by banks that also hold depositor money, was eviscerated by the first Trump Administration. And now, Trump appointees at the Fed are simply ignoring the law in gutting capital rules designed to make megabanks more resilient in a crisis.

The New Deal’s Antimonopoly Ethos

The New Dealers, by contrast, adopted a strategy that stood the test of time precisely because it embraced the antimonopoly spirit.

In 1933, the legislation known as Glass-Steagall famously imposed a separation between commercial and investment banking, which forced major banks like J.P. Morgan to downsize themselves via division. Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, a conservative southern Democrat, co-authored the law that helped break Wall Street’s grip on credit allocation. It says something about the law’s efficacy that its name is a marketable brand, a metaphor for structural change in sectors far afield of finance. Proposals for “a Glass-Steagall” have been put forth in sectors including health care, artificial intelligence, and tech platforms.

Beyond that change, the creation of FDIC deposit insurance—passed in the same legislative package as Glass-Steagall—represented a fundamental shift. Big city banks, which had repeatedly triggered crises that immiserated the entire country, had to make disproportionately large payments into a collective system that benefited smaller, mostly rural banks. Previously, a patchwork of state systems developed over the course of a century had tried to bend the few big banks to the will of the many small ones; with the New Deal, that system went national.

If Glass-Steagall and deposit insurance addressed abuses in the traditional banking system, the new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reformed markets in stocks, bonds, and other financial assets—the capital markets. Companies whose shares traded privately had to join public exchanges once they reached a certain size. Approved by Congress in 1934, the new agency then mandated that publicly traded companies provide greater transparency around their financial condition to give investors large and small the same information. This change forced market discipline on Wall Street giants who had long made a lucrative industry out of defrauding less-informed clients.

The New Dealers and their postwar successors also grappled with a problem that had vexed the country since its founding: Finance, when consolidated into large entities, tended to assert increasingly direct and malign control over the rest of the economy.

At a commercial level, the crushing influence of finance had fostered industrial consolidation on a massive scale in the early 1900s. J. Pierpont Morgan had welded together the first billion-dollar corporation, U.S. Steel. (His process for consolidating and cementing control of companies became known, creepily, as Morganization.) Later, Andrew Mellon, Treasury secretary for most of the 1920s, would assemble an industrial empire around his family’s core financial business. Progressive reformers, notably the lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, understood that bank ownership of non-financial companies created value-destroying temptations like saddling a business with debt or draining off profits without reinvesting for the future. But concrete action was a generation away.

By the time of World War II and shortly after, with Germany’s destructive, bank-enabled industrial monopolies having powered its war machine, Americans saw in financialized commerce not only ill economic effects but a menace to democracy and peace. Nazi-adjacent titans had thrown democracy under the bus in the name of preserving their ability to do business freely. In 1946, the Federal Reserve Board even called the burgeoning mixture of businesses run by A.P. Giannini, founder of Bank of America, a potential “fascist economic empire.” The Fed!

The answer to banker domination and Giannini’s threat to commerce and democracy arrived, after a long debate, with the Bank Holding Company Act (BHCA) of 1956, which deserves recognition alongside the Sherman and Clayton Acts as a pillar of the American antimonopoly tradition. The law largely barred sprawling holding companies from owning banks in multiple states, a measure designed to fortify the New Deal’s emphasis on small, local banks. It also prevented banks from entering businesses not related to banking.

Though it unleashed a decades-long regulatory cat-and-mouse game over exactly what is related to banking, the BHCA foreclosed the possibility of Giannini or anyone else becoming a new Morgan via ownership of a deposit-taking commercial bank. In 1963, the Supreme Court upheld the overall logic of this policy in its decision in United States v. Philadelphia National Bank, which confirmed that the Clayton Act could be used to break up banks. “[C]oncentration in banking,” the majority concluded, “accelerates concentration generally.”

The New Dealers’ reform of finance took place mostly outside the legal terrain defined by the foundational Sherman and Clayton Acts. But Felix Frankfurter, not yet a Supreme Court justice, sure sounded like an antimonopolist when he wrote in a letter to Roosevelt in 1934: “Nothing less is involved than to keep Wall Street in its place, to furnish a counterpoise against its aggrandizement of power, by which the Street all along the line resists efforts by the government for the common interest.”

To be sure, regulation loomed large in the New Deal mind and in postwar efforts to tame finance. But that generation of reformers appreciated the imperative of structural change. They saw that the financial collapse that had led to the Great Depression did not stem from the actions of a few bad apples but rather from systemically perverse incentives. Regulating a failed apparatus could hardly lead to better outcomes.

A Hot Monopolized Financial Mess

Fast forward in time, to when the Obama Administration looked askance at the bold spirit of the New Deal settlement in finance. Indeed, the most tenacious critic of structural change at the time was Geithner, Obama’s Treasury secretary, who is now a private equity mogul.

Unsurprisingly, the problem of financial concentration now looks far uglier than it did before Dodd-Frank. Under Trump 2.0, bank consolidation is proceeding at the fastest pace in over three decades. But Joe Biden—a financial reformer without convictions—didn’t cover himself in glory either. Biden appointees at Treasury (Yellen) and the Federal Reserve (Jerome Powell) refused to revise outdated merger guidelines as the Department of Justice had done for the nonfinancial sector. Yellen even toyed with the idea of creating more too-big-to-fail megabanks. Every single Biden appointee at the Federal Reserve voted in April 2025 to approve the awful Capital One-Discover merger.

As for capital markets, the Obama Administration played ball with Republicans to weaken New Deal reforms, fueling the growth of relatively opaque private markets to the point where one former SEC commissioner has spoken of a system that is “going dark.” The 2012 JOBS Act that Obama signed continued a long-term trend of letting private companies lure in more retail investors without the strictures of transparency and disclosure that underpinned the New Deal system. “Unicorns”—non-public companies with valuations over $1 billion—used to be a rarity. Now we have hundreds of them, many worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. Some of these firms, like Uber, WeWork, and Theranos, have generated poor governance, allegations of investor fraud, and endless litigation.

Much of the world can move money cheaply and quickly, a vital function of any financial system. The American payment system, on the other hand, is a hot monopolized mess in which efficiency is mythical and choice illusory. The Visa and Mastercard duopoly of payment card networks extracts monopoly rents from merchants (nearly $200 billion in 2025) while enjoying net profit margins of around 50 percent, and an oligopoly of big banks issues those cards. Because all customers pay the same price when they buy something, but only more well-to-do cardholders enjoy the rewards attached to payment cards, this system redistributes wealth upwards to wealthier white consumers, to the detriment of Black and brown ones.

The Fed in 2011 illegally sabotaged a Dodd-Frank provision, known as the Durbin Amendment, that was intended to slash swipe fees for debit cards. In 2023, the Fed launched FedNow for instant payments, which could provide a technological backbone for less costly solutions, but refused to require that banks use it; the other real-time system is operated by the largest banks. Those same banks operate the Automated Clearing House (ACH), a slow, clunky system that lets banks extract the time value of your money before a transaction clears.

Payment applications like Venmo, Wise, PayPal, and Cash App have developed attractive user interfaces to move money. But they obscure how dismal the back end of the payment system looks. These upstarts depend on the infrastructure operated by banks and must now increasingly pay for the data—your data, that is—to operate their business. Promises that cryptocurrencies would provide new ways to move funds have come to naught.

Over in the nonbank sector, the last 15 years have witnessed the rise of BlackRock as the largest asset manager in the world, with an astonishing $15 trillion under management. Together with Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street, it dominates the field. There is growing evidence that asset manager consolidation reduces the amount of money raised by going public, in effect subverting the basic function of stock offerings for the next generation of growth companies.

The infrastructure of finance now has single points of failure—functions dominated by just a few companies. The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation in 2017 took full control of the tri-party repo system, a means by which financial institutions manage massive short-term loans. BlackRock’s proprietary Aladdin system is an essential utility for many financial companies, including its competitors in asset management, and a source of influence over nonfinancial companies. Three firms dominate the business of software platforms that allow small banks to function.

The United States has a persistent “7 percent problem” when it comes to the cost of an initial public offering in public markets: a Wall Street-imposed tax on new companies that flows into the coffers of four investment banks. (It took an IPO the size of SpaceX to force those fees downward.) Consolidation has also created a tight circle of municipal bond underwriters and dealers that costs localities dearly. Three companies—the Intercontinental Exchange (parent of the New York Stock Exchange), Nasdaq, and Cboe Global Markets—own the majority of the 16 public securities exchanges in the United States. Three credit bureaus (TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax) dominate the consumer space, while credit rating agencies Moody’s, S&P Global, and Fitch have a lock on corporate business.

Cryptocurrency, which fancies itself a novel competitor to traditional finance but is really a throwback to antebellum-era banknotes, has simply aped Wall Street in seeking scale. In 2025, Congress put in place a legal framework for stablecoins, the digital tokens that are supposed to maintain a constant value; the stablecoin industry currently has just two players, Circle and Tether. A new consortium of Big Tech and Wall Street firms has announced a standard stablecoin. Google, Meta, and Amazon may turn themselves into de facto banks by issuing their own stablecoins. Congress, meanwhile, is debating whether to ban a Fed-backed stablecoin, lest the U.S. government exercise its sovereign function to issue money. Prohibition would probably lead to oligopoly control of this new form of money.

Financial Control of Industry

Today, we must also contend with the vast scope of private financial markets, which took shape over the last 30 years outside the regulated exchanges. This sector encompasses, most notably, private equity, but also private credit, hedge funds, and other legal constructs. They control or heavily influence vast swaths of the American economy, a problem that would be familiar to reformers of yore. With their colossal pots of money, private equity and hedge fund managers engage in the kinds of activities from which a traditional bank is barred. With a zeal for speculation that sets them apart from traditional bankers, these firms’ billionaire founders are pirates without swords who seize or raid productive enterprises.

Private equity, which collects money from institutional investors like pension funds, endowments, insurance firms, and very wealthy people, exercises an extractive, anticompetitive power in many sectors of the economy. Private equity has acquired and operated—and, often, looted into bankruptcy—companies in diverse areas such as retail, health and elder care, emergency equipment, pet supplies and grooming, autism therapy centers, enterprise software, veterinary services, youth sports, and fast food. Many of these private equity-owned companies are roll-ups of prior competitors into a single, dominant firm with pricing power over customers, be they consumers or businesses.

Private credit, in which money raised in a similar fashion is loaned to companies, represents a newer avenue of influence. It has been instrumental in shoveling money into the incipient bubble in artificial intelligence and data centers. Hedge funds, another investment vehicle, tend to take partial stakes in companies and then force them to disgorge cash, cut costs, or turn over management. (They fancy themselves liberators of badly run companies.) Regardless of the outcomes, they are, undeniably, a powerful influence on commerce.

In the years since Dodd-Frank, shadow banks have become what yesterday’s reformers feared: financial titans whose commercial power bleeds into politics. With their winnings, they have flooded the American political system with cash, eventually in support of Donald Trump. It isn’t hard to guess what the Fed officials who lambasted Giannini’s nascent “fascist economic empire” 80 years ago would think today. But don’t expect the present-day Fed to share their outlook. Former Fed chair and current board member Jerome Powell got rich in private equity. Current Fed chair Kevin Warsh spent a decade at a family hedge fund.

Breaking the Power of Finance

Through an antimonopoly prism, the most generous interpretation of Dodd-Frank is that the neo-Brandeisian movement in competition policy—of which antimonopoly thinkers Barry C. Lynn and Tim Wu and Biden officials Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter are leading lights—had not yet emerged in 2010. Now, we need new ideas for how to break the power of finance in the American economy. Happily, we are not starting at zero:

• Under the Biden Administration, the Department of Justice sued Visa over monopolistic practices in debit cards, a business rife with rent-capturing behavior, a lack of innovation, and high costs for small businesses that get passed on to consumers. The Trump Administration has so far not abandoned the suit. A robust case in the credit card sector, with the power of state or federal officials behind it, would be welcome as well.
• Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois and Roger Marshall of Kansas in 2022 introduced the Credit Card Competition Act, a bill that would inject greater competition into payments by allowing merchants to route transactions on networks other than those owned by the dominant duopoly, Visa and Mastercard. Trump has endorsed the bill, which is awaiting action in the Senate.
• The CFPB’s open banking rule could increase the portability of bank accounts and grease the wheels for more competition. Banks tried to kill it in 2025 but faced pushback from the fintech lobby, which is eager to create alternatives to traditional checking accounts. The Trump Administration has promised a revised rule.
• Caps on credit card interest rates, which would cut into the profits of the credit card oligopoly, are now on the table thanks to support from elected officials as diverse as Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Josh Hawley. Usury caps (along with vibrant local banks) helped tame finance after the New Deal.
• The Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, though long unenforced, prohibits price discrimination on goods, which disadvantages small businesses. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took some steps to enforce it under the Biden Administration. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy has proposed expanding the law to include financial services that smaller merchants need to thrive.
• Lina Khan, head of the FTC under Biden, started grappling during her tenure with the modern version of interlocking directorates, the nineteenth-century problem of de facto cartels created by having the same entities on multiple boards. She began by policing the portfolios of private equity firms where related businesses might collude.
• When he was assistant attorney general for antitrust under Biden, Jonathan Kanter reasserted the Justice Department’s role in reviewing bank mergers under the Philadelphia National Bank decision. Jeremy Kress, a former Kanter adviser, has laid out a comprehensive argument for the revival of bank antitrust.
• At a conceptual level, the scholars Saule Omarova and Graham Steele have persuasively reframed antitrust law as “a comprehensive anti-monopoly regime, designed to prevent excessive concentration of private power over the supply and allocation of money and credit in a democratic economy.”
• Senator Warren has proposed the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, which was co-sponsored by a Republican, former Senator John McCain. It would revive the separation between the commercial (deposit-taking) and capital market activities of investment banking, such as securities underwriting and proprietary trading.
• Warren also devised the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, the first serious effort to curb the abuses of private equity. Private equity finances takeovers through debt that the targeted company must repay; private equity executives, in turn, are legally insulated from the consequences of their actions, including bankruptcies, which happen to private equity-owned companies at a higher rate. The bill’s core provision makes private equity executives liable for the debt they load onto companies; no longer would this industry be all upside for Wall Streeters.
• The last decade has witnessed a renewal in the idea of public banks because government-run options provide a check on private power. California, the world’s fourth-largest economy, is currently debating this notion.

These ideas speak to an intellectual and political ferment that has brought antimonopoly thinking and critiques of finance more in line with each other. Now, we need to tie these ideas together and reinforce them through an approach that restrains the propensity of financial enterprises of all kinds to accumulate market power within their own industries—and over the real economy.

This project will demand new thinking that considers traditional antitrust law, deregulation over the past 40 years, and new developments in finance to update laws separating banking from commerce. Call it the Financial Monopoly Control Act. Its key elements would be as follows.

First: Glass-Steagall, meet Brown-Kaufman. While the Glass-Steagall approach of separating commercial banking from riskier capital market activities still has merit, time has proven Senators Brown and Kaufman correct. Limitations on the size of traditional banks are needed to reverse the explosive growth of the likes of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. And Congress must hardcode these limits into law. There have been some theoretical size restrictions since the 1990s, but regulators have waived them so often as to render them meaningless.

Next, give real trustbusters a voice in bank mergers. We should counterbalance the role of industry-friendly bank regulators in merger decisions through the full participation of the Department of Justice. The Fed and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the main big-bank regulator, effectively run merger approval under the Bank Merger Act of 1960, in part through an informal premerger consultation process. Right now, Justice is limited to providing a “competitive factors” report on bank mergers and filing a lawsuit if it so chooses. There is no foolproof defense against regulatory capture, but Justice is less likely to suffer this fate than single-industry regulators. Additionally, state attorneys general should become robust antitrust enforcers in their own right. Removing the Fed from financial regulation entirely, an idea that occasionally pops up, merits consideration as well.

Third, reinvigorate public markets by taming private funds and the unicorns. There have been attempts to make opaque private markets more like public ones by imposing new disclosure requirements—a New Deal-lite option. While laudable, these regulations would be insufficient. Warren’s private equity reform proposal gets closer to the root of the problem by imposing greater liability on private equity’s use of debt, starving these Wall Street giants of the pools of cash they need to operate. But the problem of expanded private markets and shrinking public ones is broader.

Congress must roll back the measures that created the conditions for the explosive growth of private markets and companies. Private equity, hedge funds, and our herd of unicorns took shape thanks to money from large institutional investors, none of which have been as important as pension funds, often public ones run on behalf of state employees or unions. Once investors in boring bond markets, pension funds started bankrolling private equity and hedge funds in the 1990s. Clinton-era measures, notably the National Securities Markets Improvement Act of 1996, cracked open the door to investment in private markets. The Pension Protection Act of 2006 increased what pension funds could put into private equity. The JOBS Act of 2012 gave us the explosion of unicorns. We cannot effectively revive public markets so long as money can flow into opaque sectors without limits.

An Authentically American Ethos

Dodd-Frank will leave some important positive legacies. The CFPB, despite being under siege from the financial services lobby and its allies in government from the get-go, delivered real results for everyday Americans. Its employees count among the most talented and tenacious in government. (Trump’s assault on the CFPB has cost consumers $26.5 billion.)

As chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler, a Goldman Sachs veteran turned reformer, slogged through Dodd-Frank’s mission of dragging the shady derivatives business partially into the light. And despite the Federal Reserve’s cozy relationship with megabanks, the dogged Fed governor Daniel Tarullo forced greater resilience on the biggest banks by pushing through the law’s directives to raise bank capital requirements. Other financial reformers, less known but equally tenacious, made the system and people’s lives better.

But the developments of the 15 years since the passage of Dodd-Frank have thrown the law’s shortcomings into sharp relief. Progressives have spent too much time defending Dodd-Frank without acknowledging its flaws or coming up with a comprehensive plan to do better next time. With no meaningful limits on size or structure, the passage of time has left us with egregious concentrations of market power in finance.

Fortunately, the antimonopoly movement embodies an authentically American ethos that can inform sustainable reform of finance. Meeting the historical moment when the next crisis explodes—Wall Street always causes another crisis—will demand that we follow this inspiring example.