by Amanda Engstrom

In Chamber President Tom Donohue's State of American Business address this month, he spent a fair amount of time on the regulatory burden and the tremendous cost to the economy of unnecessary - and unnecessarily burdensome - regulations. "The regulatory tsunami," he said, "is also about to wash over our capital markets." He pointed to the newly-passed Dodd-Frank bill, noting, "Dodd-Frank contains 259 mandated rulemakings, another 188 suggested rulemakings, 63 reports, and 59 studies."

Sometimes it's hard to get one's head around numbers like this. Too often, policy-makers are blind to the enormous regulatory implications of what they vote for. We can assure you that businesses are all too well-aware of them.  So to make it a little easier to envision - truly envision - what Dodd-Frank means in a regulatory sense, we have come up with this handy-dandy - if horrifically depressing and hard to read - chart, outlining these rulemakings. Click on any one of the dots to see what's in store for you. It's a good time-killer during your next long conference call. It's also - we hope - informative, and will begin to show what Congress has wrought, the regulatory mayhem that is unleashed by one piece of legislation.