Former Congressman Barney Frank said Monday the biggest value of the Dodd-Frank act is that it could prevent a Lehman Brothers type panic.

It was the September 15, 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman, then the fourth largest investment bank in the country, that triggered the financial crisis with the loss of trillions of dollars of wealth and millions of jobs and homes.

Because Dodd Frank gives regulators the ability to wind down a failing financial giant, investors won’t feel the need to rush to the exits the next time one collapses, Frank said.

The former House Financial Services Committee chairman said if he could have put one item in the law that isn’t there, it would have been a provision to combine the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The United States is the only major nation that doesn’t have securities and futures regulation under one agency. The conventional wisdom is that a combined SEC and CFTC can’t happen because no one in Washington likes to give up power. Separate committees in both houses of Congress have oversight over each agency.

A couple of years ago, then Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, the former Connecticut Senator, said his most desired change would have been for a single, consolidated bank regulator.

During an impromptu breakfast get-together, Frank said he doesn’t miss the phone ringing off the hook as it does for people in power.

He said a book he is writing should be published next spring.