Phil Gramm

The Reckoning
Deregulator Looks Back, Unswayed

Lisa Krantz for The New York Times
During his time in the Senate, Phil Gramm led the fight against more government intervention in the financial markets.

new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/business/economy/17gramm.html

By ERIC LIPTON and STEPHEN LABATON
Published: November 16, 2008
WASHINGTON — Back in 1950 in Columbus, Ga., a young nurse working double shifts to support her three children and disabled husband managed to buy a modest bungalow on a street called Dogwood Avenue.
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Times Topics: Phil Gramm

The senator often spoke of his mother’s buying their home.
Phil Gramm, the former United States senator, often told that story of how his mother acquired his childhood home. Considered something of a risk, she took out a mortgage with relatively high interest rates that he likened to today’s subprime loans.
A fierce opponent of government intervention in the marketplace, Mr. Gramm, a Republican from Texas, recalled the episode during a 2001 Senate debate over a measure to curb predatory lending. What some view as exploitive, he argued, others see as a gift.
“Some people look at subprime lending and see evil. I look at subprime lending and I see the American dream in action,” he said. “My mother lived it as a result of a finance company making a mortgage loan that a bank would not make.”
On Capitol Hill, Mr. Gramm became the most effective proponent of deregulation in a generation, by dint of his expertise (a Ph.D in economics), free-market ideology, perch on the Senate banking committee and force of personality (a writer in Texas once called him “a snapping turtle”). And in one remarkable stretch from 1999 to 2001, he pushed laws and promoted policies that he says unshackled businesses from needless restraints but his critics charge significantly contributed to the financial crisis that has rattled the nation.
He led the effort to block measures curtailing deceptive or predatory lending, which was just beginning to result in a jump in home foreclosures that would undermine the financial markets. He advanced legislation that fractured oversight of Wall Street while knocking down Depression-era barriers that restricted the rise and reach of financial conglomerates.
And he pushed through a provision that ensured virtually no regulation of the complex financial instruments known as derivatives, including credit swaps, contracts that would encourage risky investment practices at Wall Street’s most venerable institutions and spread the risks, like a virus, around the world.
Many of his deregulation efforts were backed by the Clinton administration. Other members of Congress — who collectively received hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from financial industry donors over the last decade — also played roles.
Many lawmakers, for example, insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nation’s largest mortgage finance companies, take on riskier mortgages in an effort to aid poor families. Several Republicans resisted efforts to address lending abuses. And Congressional committees failed to address early symptoms of the coming illness.
But, until he left Capitol Hill in 2002 to work as an investment banker and lobbyist for UBS, a Swiss bank that has been hard hit by the market downturn, it was Mr. Gramm who most effectively took up the fight against more government intervention in the markets.
“Phil Gramm was the great spokesman and leader of the view that market forces should drive the economy without regulation,” said James D. Cox, a corporate law scholar at Duke University. “The movement he helped to lead contributed mightily to our problems.”
In two recent interviews, Mr. Gramm described the current turmoil as “an incredible trauma,” but said he was proud of his record.
He blamed others for the crisis: Democrats who dropped barriers to borrowing in order to promote homeownership; what he once termed “predatory borrowers” who took out mortgages they could not afford; banks that took on too much risk; and large financial institutions that did not set aside enough capital to cover their bad bets.
But looser regulation played virtually no role, he argued, saying that is simply an emerging myth.
“There is this idea afloat that if you had more regulation you would have fewer mistakes,” he said. “I don’t see any evidence in our history or anybody else’s to substantiate it.” He added, “The markets have worked better than you might have thought.”
Rejecting Common Wisdom
Mr. Gramm sees himself as a myth buster, and has long argued that economic events are misunderstood.
Before entering politics in the 1970s, he taught at Texas A & M University. He studied the Great Depression, producing research rejecting the conventional wisdom that suicides surged after the market crashed. He examined financial panics of the 19th century, concluding that policy makers and economists had repeatedly misread events to justify burdensome regulation.
“There is always a revisionist history that tries to claim that the system has failed and what we need to do is have government run things,” he said.
From the start of his career in Washington, Mr. Gramm aggressively promoted his conservative ideology and free-market beliefs. (He was so insistent about having his way that one House speaker joked that if Mr. Gramm had been around when Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, the Texan would have substituted his own.)
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