President Barack Obama proposed sweeping new rules for the nation's financial system Wednesday, claiming to be trying to rectify a "cascade of mistakes and missed opportunities" that created massive economic upheaval around the world.

The changes, should they pass, would be the most profound in 75 years, since the time of the Great Depression.

The Obama plan, most of which must be approved by Congress, would create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency to monitor consumer financial products, make the Federal Reserve the overseer of companies deemed too big to fail and require hedge and private equity funds to open their books to the SEC.

"The Obama plan might not have forestalled the current crisis but it would have made it less severe and certainly not as catastrophic as it turned out to be," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com to the Associated Press.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted an 18% rise in the number of jobs for accountants and auditors - to 226,000 - by 2016, but that was well before the proposal of a massive new regulatory framework. It states that in the wake of accounting scandals, professional certification will be more important to careers in finance and accounting than ever before.