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http://www.thedailylight.com/articles/2008/09/26/opinion/doc48dd057349090511341223.txtTo the Editor,
As President Bush stared into the television camera and announced “Our entire economy is in danger!” I had to wonder ... what and or who is really behind this crisis? One individual stands behind several pieces of legislature that have affected our nation's economy.
John McCain’s self-admitted economic guru, Phil Gramm, is at the root of the foreclosure crisis that is driving this catastrophe. On Dec. 15, 2000, Gramm introduced the 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act as part of a $384 billion Omnibus spending bill.
The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the SEC nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products and would thus “protect financial institutions from overregulation” and “position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century.” Betting on the risk of any given transaction became more important “and more lucrative” than the transactions themselves. There was more betting on the riskiest sub-prime mortgages than there were actual mortgages. Gramm then blithely retired from the Senate to become an executive with UBS — surprise — a Swiss investment bank that benefited from this legislation.
The federal government has now-belatedly — decided to become involved in this legal gambling operation ... not to regulate it, but to bail it out. The beneficiaries will be the lenders, not those who were affected by their unscrupulous lending practices. There should be no blank check delivered to Henry Paulson or any of his associates who allowed this crisis to occur while their golf buddies got rich. The CEOs should be prosecuted and their assets used to resolve this crisis.
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