Consequences of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform for forex traders

Happy Friday the 13th. An inauspicious type of day, if you believe in that sort of thing. (Better not to, of course. They say it's bad luck to be superstitious.)
Ben Bernanke certainly had his share of bad luck this week. The carefully planned actions of the Federal Reserve - calibrated just so to walk that fine line between too accommodative and not enough - were thrown into a cocked hat by a barrage of ugly data points from around the world.
China slowing. Britain slowing. New sovereign debt jitters from Ireland. Japan sinking back into the muck. Perhaps worst of all, a U.S. trade deficit that clearly shows the "recovery" spinning its wheels.
What will the Federal Reserve do now? Should Bernanke and Co. react swiftly to the latest thumbs-down by Wall Street, or would that look like pandering? Has the timetable for full-blown "QE2" - shorthand for quantitative easing II, though it sounds rather like the name of a cruise ship - been sped up? Only the shadow knows.

Behold the Hollow Men
Speaking of the Fed and their ilk, my colleague Adam Lass calls them "the gray men."
In a slight twist on that idea, I think of them as "the hollow men," in keeping with T.S. Eliot's 1925 poem. Others have certainly made the comparison before yours truly - but that is because it fits so well:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
- "The Hollow Men," 1925
Quiet and meaningless whispers. Voices like wind in dry grass. Rats' feet on broken glass. Is this not an apt description of Washington from the perspective of the average American, the average small-business owner, for whom no help whatsoever has come?
Serving Their True Masters
William Greider is the author of Secrets of the Temple, one of the best books ever written on the Federal Reserve. He is also an active journalist.
One week ago - on Aug. 6, 2010 - Greider published a long piece in The Nation titled "The AIG Bailout Scandal." If you wish to read it, you can do so here. But if you are a long-time Taipan Daily reader, you don't have to read it, because Greider basically lays out the same allegations and conclusions we came to 16 months ago.
Via the findings of three government investigation panels - the Committee on Oversight and Reform, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) - Greider details, with a focus on the COP report specifically, a pattern of shady dealings and highly questionable intents Taipan Daily first clarified via "The AIG Connection - Far Worse Than You Think" back in April 2009.
The first paragraph of Greider's piece - late to the party though it is - is worth quoting:

The government's $182 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG should be seen as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the financial crisis and its costly aftermath. The story of American International Group explains the larger catastrophe not because this was the biggest corporate bailout in history but because AIG's collapse and subsequent rescue involved nearly all the critical elements, including delusion and deception. These financial dealings are monstrously complicated, but this account focuses on something mere mortals can understand - moral confusion in high places, and the failure of governing institutions to fulfill their obligations to the public.