Academic

Congress well and truly looks like it is about to pass financial regulatory reform, and you can follow the travails of the legislative process two ways, it seems to me.  First, you could cover it hourly - there have been lots of developments, and Ezra Klein did this for health care reform.  This is the politics model of regulatory reform.  Or you could just confidently wait until it was passed, as we all knew would happen.  This is sort of the Ray Fair model of regulatory reform (Fair can tell you, with stunning accuracy, who will win the next presidential election based on two factors: the approval polling of the president and the state of the economy).  You can predict legislation after every financial crisis, and usually one component of the legislation will be directed to fighting the last war, that is, fixing whatever went most headliney wrong last time.

Since you can follow the Fair approach, why would you ever care about the daily ins and outs, per Klein?  Well, the ins and outs certainly aren't for everyone.  But if you care about the details of the bill - say, if you're a participant in regulated industry - then you might, and it is details that lawyers and lobbyists can affect.  For example, resolution authority looked like it would always be part of the bill, and it will be.  But the particularly strong derivatives developments are pretty surprising, and may owe more to hard to predict factors like Arkansas reelection politics than anything else.  But it is this sort of marginal, detail work that can be affected by the political process.  Anyway, the following chart is pretty informative:

Via.