US Senate passes historic financial overhaul

WASHINGTON  -- By a vote of 60 to 39, the US Senate approved Thursday the landmark financial overhaul, setting a new milestone in the US financial regulatory legislation history since the Great Depression in 1930s.

By a final vote of 60 to 39, the Senate passed the massive overhaul Thursday, nearly two years after a financial crisis struck the US economy into the deepest recession in over 70 years.

President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law next week.

The 2,300-page legislation, the most ambitious rewrite of financial regulations in decades, aims to curb Wall Street's high- risk practices blamed for the global economic meltdown of 2008, solve the systemic risk of the "too big to fail" problem among financial firms, and create a consumer protection agency to better protect Americans.

The Obama administration proposed the legislation in June 2009 in an effort to avoid the repeat of the financial crisis in the past two years.

Named after Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the bill is expected to be described as another political victory by the Obama administration after the health care bill which was signed into law by the president earlier this year.

The House of Representatives approved it on June 30.

Democrats accredited the bill a historic win over the reckless Wall Street.

"When this earthquake hit, there wasn't nearly enough oversight, transparency or accountability to shield us from the fallout," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said. "This law will strengthen all three."

"It is not a perfect bill, I will be the first to admit that," Dodd said. "It will take the next economic crisis, as certainly it will come, to determine whether or not the provisions of this bill will actually provide this generation or the next generation of regulators with the tools necessary to minimize the effects of that crisis."

However, Republicans said the bill is a vast federal overreach that will be a "job killer" under the circumstance that job creation is the top priority on President Obama's agenda. They said that the bill may drive financial-sector jobs overseas.

US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke hailed the passage of the bill shortly after the vote finished.

"The financial reform legislation approved by the Congress today represents a welcome and far-reaching step toward preventing a replay of the recent financial crisis," Bernanke said in a statement.