The top Wall Street lobby, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) was neither fully on board with the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, nor fully opposed.

These days, though, their view is pretty clear: we can live with this law; we can't live with Republicans messing with it. Here's a passage from an article in the Hill:

While Republicans continue to fight the fight, Wall Street seems to have moved on and is now focused on getting the best rules possible from regulators implementing the law. 

Tim Ryan, president and chief executive officer of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), said last month that the Dodd-Frank fight was over. 

“Today, the industry’s view as expressed by SIFMA is Dodd-Frank is the law,” said Ryan. “We are all about providing substantive input so that the government produces final regulations that make sense.”

This is one reason government growth is never reversed. Companies and lobbies sink costs into working on the regulatory process and complying with new rules -- the last thing they want is for those rules to disappear.

I covered a different angle of this topic last week after a New York Times piece exuded shock that Wall Street lawyers wanted more enforcement of Wall Street regulations. I wrote:

Think about the characters here: these are revolving-door lawyers, whose value to their employer is their connections to the SEC, their familiarity with SEC regulations. If the SEC isn't enforcing regulations aggressively, these lawyers become less valuable.