We used to joke about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as something akin to a full employment act for accountants. It created lots of jobs without a doubt. Now comes Dodd-Frank, and some are calling it a mini-jobs creation bill as well.

It's fair to say that even before the bill became law, the lobbying effort kicked into overdrive, giving rise to lots of work for lobbyists, compliance officers, risk specialists and the like. IT units also faced the need for more risk-oriented specialists. This is lucrative work, legally speaking anyway.

The New York Times, which calls the phenomena "Dodd-Frank, Inc.," notes that the cost of writing a 17-page letter on the new derivatives rules by a law firm was $100,000.

"Now, the Dodd-Frank Act is quickly becoming such a gold mine that even Wall Street bankers, never ones to undercharge, are complaining that the costs are running amok.  ‘It's basically lawyers, hired guns and money,' said the chief financial officer of a major Wall Street firm, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. ‘Everyone has an angle.' No one yet is tracking all the money being spent to deal with Dodd-Frank (which in itself could be an entrepreneurial venture), but a back-of-the-envelope calculation puts it in the billions of dollars."

In the end, given the sweeping nature of some of the reform and the massive legal fights that loom, this is looking more like a WPA-like success. Who says that government initiatives can't create high-paying quality jobs? No one is talking about off-shoring these lucrative positions.

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