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Originally Posted by Mulderator Where's your support for that? |
for what....my guess?
read up on gramm....before he even left the senate, he had a job waiting for him at UBS (vp of their investment banking division), currently under indictment for helping to divert US clients into offshore entities to avoid taxes, something that an IRS program had prohibited.....they even ignored the advice of their own american legal council
http://abajournal.com/news/internal_...zies_warnings/
is that gramm's doing?
doubtful....the guy seems pretty ethical actually.....but it's something that his history of laissez-faire beliefs would probably support, were it not for the law.
like you, mulder, he doesn't believe that regulation serves any productive purpose in a free market economy....but unlike you, he rose to the top of the policy heap, and convinced others that the fuddy duddy glass steagall act was outdated, with archaic controls that limited the financial sector's ability to market creatively.
i believe the republicans caved into your arguement about the democrats wanting some assurance that financial products would be offered equally to the poor and/or marginally qualified because, in a laissez-faire environment, gramm didn't fully appreciate that the poor and/or marginally qualified where just the same as the wealthier/more "successful" folk....they knew how to sieze opprotunity.
or perhaps he was, like the critics of obama have maintained, blinded by his own vision....because gramm/leach/blidley was just the beginning
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Gramm threw his weight behind the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which, among other things, paved the way for a boom in those nasty credit default swaps that are coming back to haunt us all. Writes Galbraith:This, combined with other deregulatory moves by the CFTC [Commodity Futures Trading Commission], broadened the ‘swaps loophole,’ an enormous backdoor into the commodities markets, basically permitting speculators making bets off the commodities exchanges to be treated as ‘commercial interests’—like say, farmers—and hence avoid the scrutiny (including limits on the size of their bets) normally applied to financial players. |
it''s not without reason that many point to the guy as the father of this fiasco.....while i feel he has some valid beliefs on corporate tax structures, and makes a good arguement for the huge compensation packages of corporate executives, he seems entirely consumed by the idealism embedded in the capitalistic spirit.....problems that cannot be soothed by free enterprise don't interest him, imo
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In 1990 Gramm failed in an effort to amend the Iraq International Law Compliance Act of 1990. An earlier amendment to the act, the D’Amato Amendment, prohibited the US from selling arms or extending any sort of financial assistance to Iraq unless the President could prove Iraq was in “substantial compliance” with the provisions of a number of human rights conventions, including the genocide convention. After reading the D’Amato Amendment, Gramm introduced his own amendment to counter the human rights sanctions in the D’Amato Amendment. Gramm’s amendment would have allowed the Bush administration to waive the terms of the D'Amato Amendment if it found that sanctions against Iraq hurt US businesses and farms more than they hurt Iraq.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Gramm |
{in fairness, i'll note that this wiki appraisal is sourced to samantha powers, an obama supported named to his national security council}
but the point remains....he is idealistic in his belief that capitalism is hindered only by regulation in its quest to make the world a better place -specifically the american world (he's exceedingly america-centric...doubt if fully comprehends the implications of a global economy)....and his failure to see that human nature will make a mockery of that idealism is just as bad as anything that can be presented about the idealism of the liberal mindset......
different pods, perhaps....but they are both peas.
there's enough fault in this to spread across the political spectrum
fwiw, i agree with you about the new CA "taxes"....they're disgusting....and i'm surprised (naively, i'm sure) that some of them are just illegal.
as far as investments in the market....it's got more to do with trusting the leadership of corporate america, imo.....believe what you want about the benefits of capitalism.....i'm sick of the greed it promotes when given the opprotunity......