Thanks Phil–With Friends Like These….
Jul 11th, 2008 by DavidAnderson
Stop whining, said McCain economic advisor Senator Phil Gramm. (click for video) I wondered why Phil didn’t quite catch on when he ran.
Senator McCain said, “I don’t agree with Senator Gramm… America is in great difficulty…Phil Gramm doesn’t speak for me, I speak for me”. This should settle it if there is any honesty in politics. I am holding my breath. I lost. This is the game we play. I think the real issues of energy independence in his statement are what was meaningful. Yet the real issues once again got overlooked in the gotcha media. Not here.
Senator Gramm, don’t worry there are months between now and election–an Ambassadorship to Belarus may not be in your future.(Do you think Senator McCain was hinting that he wanted to put some distance between he and Phil.)
Years before Phil Gramm was a McCain campaign adviser and a lobbyist for a Swiss bank at the center of the housing credit crisis, he pulled a sly maneuver in the Senate that helped create today’s subprime meltdown. Like most republicans, he loves DEREGULATION and NO GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT. We don’t need government when corporations are involved; but we definitely need the when it’s your bedroom or cell phone. But whatever. Hey. If McCain wins, Gramm will be Treasury Secretary. So the guy that has as much to do with the mortgage meltdown and the global crisis gets to run OUR economy!
Of course, Gramm was at the center of the Enron debacle. That legislation contained a provision—lobbied for by Enron, a generous contributor to Gramm—that exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight, allowing Enron to run rampant, wreck the California electricity market, and cost consumers billions before it collapsed. (For Gramm, Enron was a family affair. Eight years earlier, his wife, Wendy Gramm, as cftc chairwoman, had pushed through a rule excluding Enron’s energy futures contracts from government oversight. Wendy later joined the Houston-based company’s board, and in the following years her Enron salary and stock income brought between $915,000 and $1.8 million into the Gramm household.)
But the Enron loophole was small potatoes compared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash. Credit default swaps are essentially insurance policies covering the losses on securities in the event of a default. Financial institutions buy them to protect themselves if an investment they hold goes south. It’s like bookies trading bets, with banks and hedge funds gambling on whether an investment (say, a pile of subprime mortgages bundled into a security) will succeed or fail. Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm’s bill—which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers—a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed.
Ya gotta love republican “economics.”
For more on forclosure Phil: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/foreclosure-phil.html
It’s a shame Mr. McCain didn’t take some time to actually talk to Mr. Gramm before making him a “top economic adviser.” Seems like that would have been a good idea. Maybe they could have determined whether or not they agreed on issues. Perhaps Mr. Gramm might have had some idea about Mr. McCain’s positions on things. I dunno; that’s what *I* might have done, but I’m not experienced and qualified enough to run for such high office.
It’s almost like I’m being baited to say something like “You might actually be more experienced than Obama.”
Then you’d be missing the point. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I was trying to be too subtle.