Dodd's Bill Won't Do It: Firing Line

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) fired his initial volley at Wall Street this week.

While not a formal piece of legislation, the working document is enough of a bomb to cause unforeseen damage to the financial industry. I guess the best defense against the attention being paid to his own financial shenanigans is to attack someone else.

Does anyone in Washington actually believe that more regulation is going to prevent a financial crisis from happening in the future?

Congress has a short memory. After Enron imploded, Congress rushed in with its badge and a gun after the fact and its resulting busy work produced the train wreck known as Sarbanes-Oxley. This onerous piece of legislation has cost businesses across the nation billions of dollars in additional administrative costs and driven businesses out of the country.

All of that legislation of course didn't prevent the current crisis. Incentivizing, or threatening (it depends on which side of the aisle you sit on), banks to provide mortgages to people who couldn't afford them, along with a shady mortgage industry, guys in suits who figured out they could sushi up loans and sell them as securities, and the Fed's interest rate policy, all came together to bring us to where we are today. That's a lot to follow, and more to the point, a lot to try and fix and legislate. That sounds like a dare! To Dodd's cave!