The week before the sweeping Dodd-Frank Act was signed into law in the US, Larry Meyer, a former member of the Federal Reserve's board of governors in Washington, remarked that the central bank had emerged as the "biggest winner" from the messy and often politically fraught process of drafting the statute. "At the beginning," he said, "there was such hostility to the Fed."1

By the time the bill completed the conference process, a controversial amendment requiring that the Fed be subjected to a