Last week President Obama signed yet another landmark bill, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, into law. The bill’s passage into law is supposed to represent the solution to the problems of Wall Street which helped directly cause the current financial crisis.

Instead, however, the bill may prove to be much less game-changing to the Wall Street culture of speculation than one would have hoped, and could prove to be a poor use of precious political capital.

Publicly, before the bill’s signing, the general trend was for the financial industry and conservative news media in tandem to bad-mouth the bill saying it was too harsh on the banks, a seemingly standard operating procedure.

But after it was signed into law last Wednesday, there have been a number of Wall Street traders, hedge fund managers, and business media commentators beginning to talk about how the bill was too watered-down and doesn’t do enough to regulate the industry in a way as to prevent the causes of the current crisis from happening again.

Whether these people are just able to speak more freely now that negotiations of the bill have ended or they’re just intending to be politically contrarian to Obama is debatable, but the truth is that there seems to be a generational divide on Wall Street as to the type of needed regulations.

There are a number of legends on Wall Street, such as John Bogle and George Soros (81 and 79, respectively), who feel passionately that the current set of new regulations is simply not enough to keep Wall Street in check; while young-comers such as Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon (55 and 54, respectively) are more content with the current culture and regulatory framework.

This older generation, represented by Bogle and Soros, was present for an era of banking that was created in response to the culture of financial speculation of the 1920’s and the subsequent crash of 1929. From the mid 30’s to the late 60’s banking was regulated into a sort of public utility. It was stable, low-risk and government-insured.

Banks focused on taking deposits and making loans, while high-risk investment and security trading were restricted to separate institutions.

Beginning in the 1970s, and escalating into the ‘80s and ‘90s, these regulations that kept the financial industry stable for decades were increasingly removed in order to make way for speculative gambles and high-risk returns on public deposits that would be paid for by the government (i.e. the taxpayer) in the event these gambles turned out badly.

Now, I’m not saying people shouldn’t be allowed to speculate — or legally gamble — with their own money. It just shouldn’t be allowed with public deposits that are government-insured; that’s called socializing the loss and privatizing the profit. This is what the Glass-Stegall act prevented from its enactment in 1933 until its final repeal in 1999; and it’s what the “Volker Rule” (named after ex fed chairman Paul Volker, 82) would have done, though it’s been watered down into a mere nuisance for banks to bypass, instead of actually preventing them from any proprietary trading.

In short, the Dodd-Frank bill is not completely devoid of positive outcomes. It makes good efforts at beginning to reign-in and monitor derivative transactions, and the consumer protection agency it creates — along with new powers granted to the Federal Reserve — I believe are a step in the right direction.

But this bill is like having your arm cut off and attempting to put a band-aid over it. It falls short of the deeper directional change necessary to bring about lasting stability — similar to what we received after the Great Depression. We should be more mindful of the perspectives that these veterans such as Volker, Soros and Bogle bring to the table, as they are first-hand witnesses of a financial industry culture which no longer exists.