With the Dodd-Frank Act finally clearing Congress and heading to President Barack Obama’s desk to be signed into law, financial-markets pundits of all political stripes are busying themselves trying to distinguish which entities will emerge as winners from the financial reform process.

The problem? There aren’t many, with the exception of the politicians themselves (who can now return to their constituencies and make campaign fodder out of claims that their actions have helped protect the rest of us from another near meltdown) and the securities lawyers, who will be employed for many years to come by bankers and other Wall Street participants trying to shape the details of the new rules and regulations and later trying to overturn them. That’s hardly good news for financial-market stability—or for all of us on Main Street.

True, there are some initiatives that have worthwhile objectives. The Volcker Rule, as it has been dubbed, will force big banking institutions to walk away from proprietary trading and scale back their direct investments in hedge funds and buyout funds. They will also face a big incentive to scale back some of their derivatives-trading operations.

To the extent that this pushes Wall Street’s powerhouse firms to focus more on using their intellectual capital and on serving their traditional clients first and foremost, that could be helpful. But the new restrictions seem certain to have unintended consequences; Oliver Ireland, a partner at Morrison & Foerster, points to the potential for the restrictions to curb liquidity and trading. “By saying you can’t trade certain kinds of assets that you might have on your books, there’s less trading,” he points out. That raises the specter of another liquidity crunch in future market shocks.

Nor will the Volcker Rule, in and of itself, curb risk taking. Rather, some current and former investment bankers fret that risk taking—which is the only way for financial institutions to deliver the returns on equity to which their shareholders have now become accustomed—will, over time, simply shift into new products and new strategies that aren’t explicitly restricted by the new laws.

With many analysts predicting that the new rules will slash profits at the biggest banks—including powerhouse players Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase—by 10 percent to 20 percent, it’s likely just a matter of time before the race to replace those earnings gets under way. “There’s going to be an incentive to find a way around this. No one in Congress can pass a law changing the banking mind-set to one that is comfortable with low rates of return and the plain-vanilla businesses of yore,” one former senior banker tells StreetWise.

In the near term, at least, those giant banks that are more focused on those straightforward businesses of deposit-taking and extending loans to businesses and individuals appear to have an advantage. But it remains to be seen if that will last. After all, those are the businesses whose profit margins have already shrunk to razor-thin levels.

Perhaps the only Wall Street institutions to benefit from the proposed changes are the stock and futures and options trading exchanges in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. Now, these rivals will be battling for the business of clearing trades on all kinds of newly standardized derivatives contracts that previously just involved two counterparties, such as banks. In an era where trading fees have plunged to almost uneconomic levels, additional revenue from these new businesses could be a bonanza for the exchanges that craft the most efficient and appealing model.

Consumers are supposed to be the other big beneficiaries of the reform package. Indeed, it is in their name that many lawmakers have been convinced to support the Dodd-Frank Act. First and foremost, there’s the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which will try to ensure that we’ll be safeguarded from predatory lenders and bad financial products. That sounds great, but it’s one of those reforms that, in the way it is being implemented, risks ending up more as a feel-good measure than as one that will significantly change the well-being of consumers.