I haven’t had a whole lot of time to look through this issue of Mother Jones yet, but I wanted to mention one article- Foreclosure Phil- on the sub prime crisis and how John McCain’s economic advisor (and potential Secretary of the Treasury) can be pointed towards as one answer for the question MoJO poses
Who’s to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time?
In that article, Michael Greenberger is quoted as saying “I happen to think Gramm did not know what he was doing. I don’t think a member in Congress had read the 262-page bill or had thought of the cataclysm it would cause.”
Okay, but somebody wrote those 262 pages, right? THEY (whoever they were) probably had a pretty fair idea of the contents and implications of the bill…
Besides, according to MoJo,
The act, [Gramm] declared, would ensure that neither the sec nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps—and would thus “protect financial institutions from overregulation” and “position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century.”
It’s really only a “cataclysm” if you weren’t secretly socking away your swaps bets from Bear Stearns in an offshore tax haven.
“I’ve never been involved in a trade with such unlimited upside.” (John Paulson- who by selling short the subprime market, earned $3.7 billion last year.)
Hedge Funds Aren’t to Blame for Mortgage Mess
