USA Today helps with disinformation re the Credit Catastrophe - ignores PHIL GRAMM

[JohnWxy]

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/12/whos-to-blame-f.html

USA Today in their editorial entitled: "Who's to blame for economy?" says:

"Responsibility for the financial meltdown is so widespread that there's plenty of culpability to go around."

They list, in order of magnitude of guilt: Investment Bankers, Alan Greenspan, Rating Agencies, Predatory Lenders, Clueless Borrowers, Congress, Geo. W. Bush, Clinton(of course) and Regulators.

Regarding regulators they say of the SEC "Also deserving its lump is the Securities and Exchange Commission, chaired by former representative Christopher Cox, R-Calif. The SEC actively encouraged major investment banks to take on more risk, and it oversaw a failed experiment in self-regulation".


Really? "a failed experiment in self-regulation"? And how did that experiment get under way? This experiment was initiated by the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization_Act_of_2000">Commodities Futures Modernization Act - promoted and sponsored by Phil Gramm - the most ardent deregulator in Congress and the one person you left out of your entire litany of 'perps'.

The CFMA was slipped in as a rider to the Omnibus Spending Bill of 2000 (an 11,000 page document). Barely anyone in Congress new they were voting on it. THey voted on the OSB in the final hours of the Congressional Session of 2000.

Alan Greenspan dserves a healthy amount of blame as he repeatedly ignored concerns raised about the overheated housing market and predatory lenders. But It was this legislation that made trading in Credit Default Swaps legal and UNREGULATED. It was THIS legislation which enabled the investment bankers to indulge their greed and produce this Credit Catastrophe. (Alan Greenspan deserves a healthy amount of blame as he repeatedly ignored concerns raised about the overheated housing market and predatory lenders and concerns about the unregulated trading in derivative instruments. But it was the CFMA that made it possible for all this to transpire.

But I wouldn't want anyone in M$M to actually inform the public on HOW this disaster actually came to be. With your long list of guilty parties you managed to spread the responsibility around quite nicely and still not mention the actual perpetrator. Without this information the last words in your editorial "a failed experiment in self-regulation" hangs in the air without a cause. THe cause was the belief in deregulation of financial markets and the real perpetrators were the Republican party with special recognition given to Phil Gramm. With their experiment having been run we now face a economic melt-down which may rival the Depression of the 1930s. One thing is now clear, Gramm and the Republicans have demonstrated without any doubt that deregulation means disaster.