It was disturbing enough when Senator Ted Cruz announced that Neil Bush, brother of Jeb and George W., would be a Finance Chairman of his campaign.
Neil defrauded U.S. taxpayers out of $1.5 billion dollars in a savings and loan scam. Now however, Cruz has announced a key appointment that should disturb voters even more.
Cruz named Former Texas Senator Phil Gramm as his economic guru. This guy virtually crashed the U.S. economy. Gramm is largely responsible for two bills which led to the speculative bubble which popped in September 2008. First was his Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill that repealed Glass Steagall, which separated investment banking from commercial banking. Its repeal — which was signed into law by President Clinton, with the backing of Robert Rubin and Larry Summers — opened the door for a flood of money, from commercial banks, to flow into mortgage-backed securities and other funny-money schemes, which blew up in 2008.
The second bill was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which totally freed derivative trading from any regulatory oversight. This was another Phil Gramm bill, and was central to the bubble creation from 2000 to 2008, and then again today.
Following the crash of 2008, the Dodd Frank bill was backed by Obama and teams of Wall Street lobbyists, who mobilized to make sure that Glass Steagall was not restored, and that the CFMA was kept in place. As a result, when combined with bailouts and Quantitative Easing, a new bubble has grown, allowing Wall Street speculators to continue the Ponzi scheme, while depriving the real economy of credit.
Phil Gramm is now an official at UBS, the Swiss bank which has been under fire for its protection of tax-cheating U.S. corporations and the upper echelon of financial speculators. Gramm would be the architect of the Cruz economic model, great for Wall Street but no so hot for American taxpayers.
As for Hillary, she has rejected a return to Glass Steagall, as she has become the darling of Wall Street speculators who are heavily funding her campaign. She vehemently defends Bill’s role in the repeal of Glass Steagall.
And, of course, she shares with Cruz a fondness for Goldman Sachs. The bank bailed out by U.S. taxpayers paid Hillary $675,000 for a speech. They also made a secret sweetheart loan to Ted Cruz’s U.S. Senate campaign. So in a Clinton-Cruz race the folks on Wall Street win either way
God help us.