After two years of shouting, grandstanding and backroom lobbying, the nitty gritty of the rules from Dodd-Frank are starting to become clear. And it is not pretty. A recent proposal by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. would put a fairly serious damper on CMBS, by curtailing the B piece buyer and keeping originators from realizing profits too soon.

To people outside the industry this rule-making may seem arcane and even, possibly, just. After all, the real estate/financial could arguably be said to be the source of the financial meltdown, albeit the residential sector.

And even if someone doesn’t hold a comeuppance point of view on the subject, the fact of the matter is, the impact these new regulations imposed on CMBS and related instruments will have are too arcane for most people to grasp or at least sympathize.

And that would include me (the sympathy part I mean). Oh sure I understand the importance CMBS has to the industry; to a certain extent my livelihood depends on a healthy market. But we saw some $10 billion of CMBS issuance last year - a year when the market was still struggling to emerge from the grave. If CMBS can survive that, my secret thinking goes, it can surely survive a bit of inept tinkering by Congress.

Until the reform and regulation movement hits a little too close to home. I will never directly have to worry about new regulations affecting the financial system, but the revamping of the tax code, which Congress and the Obama Administration is readying to battle over--now that is going to affect me directly.

Some of the proposals are widely known and widely loathed--the elimination of mortgage interest as a deduction and charitable giving, for instance. My personal opinion is that these will never be rescinded no matter how much money they might bring to Treasury.

Then I see that one proposal is calling for a cap on the tax deductibility of retirement plans. Are. They. Kidding. Me. Being able to stuff my retirement account as full as possible is the basis of my personal financial strategy. But I am in the minority--at least based on the state of Americans’ retirement accounts--and this issue is not likely to fuel many people’s passion. Rather, it will mostly affect the self-employed and small businesses, which means my confidence that it will remain intact is very low. Congress talks a good game about small businesses, but in the end it always seems that larger corporate interests come out on top. Or perhaps maybe not--just look at the regulations looming over the CMBS space. I guess I have more in common with the CMBS market than I realized.