the long-anticipated package of reforms for the financial services industry has been hashed out by Congress, but investors in the sector now may have less to fear from the impact of the negotiations than from mounting worries about the global economy.

The reform package includes provisions that will restrict banks' high-risk trading activity, force them to spin off some of their derivatives trading operations and give the Federal Reserve power to regulate interchange fees charged by banks that issue credit cards. Those are significant issues for retail investors and consumers, but analysts say they probably won't affect the outlook for the sector.

Banks have faltered in recent months as European debt worries have reined in its outsized gains, but they remain far ahead of the broader market. On Thursday, the SPDR KBW Bank fund, an exchange-traded fund that includes Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp and J.P. Morgan Chase among its largest holdings, stood up 12.1% for the year to date. The benchmark S&P 500 stock index was down 3.7%.

That gap was even wider before recent developments in the European debt crisis.

"Had we had clear signs of continued economic recovery, and had the crisis in Europe not erupted, then I don t think that people would have been so concerned about the reform going through," says Richard Staite, an analyst with Atlantic Equities. "I think the market would have taken it in its stride."

Although the industry has had ample time to prepare itself for some form of increased regulation since the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, some banking experts say some pieces of the final bill will be bad for business, and the economy as a whole.

Richard Bove, an analyst with Rochdale Securities, says provisions that will force banks to boost capital requirements won't just hamper profits in the sector, but will actually crimp the broader recovery.

"They're prevented from making as many loans if their required capital goes up substantially," he said before Congress finalizaed negotiations. "What we can expect to see is that the rest of their customers and businesses will be impacted to the point of maybe even driving us into the next recession."

Even reform advocates like Mike Konczal, an economist and fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, don't see the final version of the reform package as a radical reformulation of the industry's rules. Before the negotiations were through, he said "absurd amounts of lobbying" and the necessities of political deal-making mean agencies such as the Federal Reserve will have more power to enforce rules, but it's not clear they have the manpower or expertise to affect meaningful changes in the industry.

"It's a technocratic fix," he says. "It's a fix for regulators, and it's unknown how they will carry it out. It could be strongly enforced, or it could be weakly enforced."

Staite said the overhanging concerns on legislation have been supplanted by concerns abroad, and that's where investors should focus.

"The outlook over the past couple of months has clearly deteriorated, and I would say that the greater impact is what's happened in Europe than U.S. financial reform."