Two and a half years after passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, two-thirds of its mandated rules have yet to be issued, and more than a hundred of its deadlines have been missed, writes Mark Gongloff of the Huffington Post. “Meanwhile, no banker has yet gone to jail for any of the actions leading up to the crisis,” he adds, “and efforts to hold the banks accountable have been few and far between, consisting mainly of modest fines, with the banks neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.”

To the disappointment of many industry critics, the law stopped short of direct action to downsize the five biggest banks, which, according to Bloomberg, held about $8.7 trillion in combined assets at the end of the third quarter of 2012 – “or about 55 percent of the entire U.S. annual gross domestic product… up from about 43 percent before the crisis…”

AFR’s Policy Director Marcus Stanley, interviewed for Gongloff’s article, points to two indirect ways in which full implementation of Dodd-Frank might nevertheless address the Too Big to Fail Problem: higher capital requirements for the biggest banks, and the Volcker Rule, which bars banks from speculating with their own money.

“Both provisions could force big banks to get smaller, hiving off trading operations or other parts that make them too bulky,” Gongloff writes, but “neither provision has been finalized, and the Volcker Rule has been riddled with exemptions before it even takes effect.”

The article also examines the rule-making obstacles at the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, two agencies with critical roles to play in monitoring the markets for “the exotic derivatives that contributed to the last crisis, from credit default swaps (CDS) to collateralized debt obligations (CDO) to CDOs stuffed with CDSs.”

The SEC currently has two Democratic commissioners “who will vote to put rules in place and two Republicans who often won’t,” Gongloff writes.”

“We need three votes to get rules through, or Dodd-Frank will be crippled,” says Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor and former financial regulator.

“The CFTC is radically underfunded,” Stanley says. “Their personnel count is roughly pretty similar to the mid-1990s, and Dodd-Frank has increased their workload by eight-fold.”