“The recession we’re emerging from was primarily caused by a lack of responsibility and accountability from Wall Street to Washington,” Mr. Obama said, adding, “That’s why I made passage of Wall Street reform one of my top priorities as president, so that a crisis like this does not happen again.”

Image Senator Christopher Dodd with fellow Democrats after the Senate voted to pass a financial regulation reform bill in a 59-39 vote. Credit... Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The president also signaled that he would take a strong hand in developing the final bill, which could mean changes to the restrictive derivatives provisions the Senate measure includes and Wall Street opposes. It is also likely that the administration will try to remove an exemption in the House bill that would shield auto dealers from oversight by a new consumer protection agency. Earlier, Mr. Obama had criticized the provision as a “special loophole” that would hurt car buyers.

As the Senate neared a final vote, Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, withdrew an amendment to put a similar exemption for auto dealers into the Senate bill.

Mr. Brownback’s move had the effect of killing an amendment by Senators Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, to tighten language barring banks from proprietary trading, or playing the markets with their own money — a restriction generally known as the Volcker rule for the former Fed chairman Paul A. Volcker, who proposed the idea. Congressional Republican leaders, adopting an election-year strategy of opposing initiatives supported by the Obama administration, voiced loud criticism of the legislation while trying to insist that they still wanted tougher policing of Wall Street.

But while Republicans criticized the bill in mostly political terms, arguing that it was an example of Democrats’ trying to expand the scope of government, some experts have warned that the bill, by focusing too much on the causes of a past crisis, still leaves the financial system vulnerable to a major collapse.

The Senate bill, sponsored primarily by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the banking committee, would seek to curb abusive lending by creating a powerful Bureau of Consumer Protection within the Federal Reserve to oversee nearly all consumer financial products.