PHIL GRAMM IS TERRIBLY CONFUSED

In an interview with Free Market Fairy Lover Stephen Moore, Phil Gramm, a senior economic advisor to McCain, makes this astounding claim:

I broach the next subject delicately. His accusers charge that he nearly single-handedly torpedoed the housing and financial market when he wrote the laws that took down the Depression-era barriers between investment and commercial banks. Was it a bad idea in retrospect?

"The law has come under fire from the same people whose solution to every problem is always more and more government control of the economy," he says. "Broadening the base of financial institutions had nothing to do with the subprime problem. There's every evidence that the markets were made more stable by the diversification. J.P. Morgan could not have bought Bear Stearns and prevented a meltdown without Gramm-Leach-Bliley."

That's another misleading half-truth! The real reason Morgan went through with the purchase was that the Fed took on the part of the Big ShitPile that Bear Stearns owned and the Treasury said it would make good any losses Morgan incurred.