How much damage did Dodd-Frank do to the economy?

Peter J. Wallison has a piece at the American Magazine that the impact of Dodd-Frank on the economy.

. . . Although event studies like this are always subject to question, the fact that the same patterns are seen in overall GDP and in two major sectors of the economy lends support to the idea that they had the same cause. Moreover, no other event at the outset of the third quarter of 2010 can explain the two-year persistence of the decline that followed.

The question is why—why did this act have such a dramatic effect on the U.S. economy, essentially stifling the modest recovery that had begun almost a year earlier? The most likely explanation is uncertainty. The Dodd-Frank Act was such a comprehensive piece of legislation—and required so many new regulations before its effects could be fully evaluated—that many financial institutions and firms simply decided to wait for regulatory developments before expanding, hiring new workers, or rehiring workers who had previously been laid off.

The act also had very substantial unintended consequences. In part, this was the result of the short shrift that the relevant congressional committees gave to specific provisions before adopting the law. Following the precept of the president’s then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel that “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” the law was rushed through Congress only 18 months after the Obama administration took office and 13 months after the first draft of the law was available to Congress and the public. This would have been warp speed for any one of the major provisions in the act. For a law with dozens of complex, radical, and occasionally contradictory provisions, adopting it so quickly and with so little real understanding of its effects verged on dereliction of duty. . . .