The McDonough School of Business and PricewaterhouseCoopers shed light on the recent financial regulatory shake-ups at the 2nd annual U.S. and Global Financial Reform Conference this Thursday.

Organized by the MSB’s Center for Financial Markets and Policy in the Rafik B. Hariri Building, the conference presented five keynote speakers and four panel discussions. All the talks focused on the impact of the new market rules, according to Reena Aggarwal, director of the center and business professor.

“The objective is to bring policy makers, regulators and academic scholars together, to discuss the status of new financial regulations and the challenges/opportunities for financial institutions,” Aggarwal wrote in an email.

The conference’s panelists included many leading policy-makers, legal officials, professors, bankers and other market professionals from the government, universities and private firms. The participants’ expertise centered on financial regulation, like the Dodd-Frank Bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in 2010 and the effects of the regulation’s implications.

The audience was comprised largely of those also knowledgeable in financial reforms, with a varied collection of people from academia and finance in attendance.

The first two panels dealt with issues regarding a new classification of certain financial institutions like large insurers, while the third and fourth panels dealt with the impact of new regulations on capital markets and consumer regulations respectively.

Adam Levitin, professor of law at Georgetown, spoke about consumer regulations and expressed his approval of the rules when asked about the effectiveness of the Dodd-Frank regulations.

“[Dodd-Frank] gets it right on the structural side,” Levitin said. “It creates a regulatory structure that covers pretty much all consumer financial players.”

The conference’s keynote speakers included Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodities Futures and Trading Commission, who discussed how his commission was enacting new safety measures. The commission encouraged rules such as encouraging whistleblowers and applying more stringent regulations to organizations that exchange banks’ money by forcing them to pool data to form a public national database.

Gensler then held a question and answer session for members of the media.