Word: defaults
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...played the leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial banks from Wall Street, and he inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives such as credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). (See who's to blame for the current financial crisis...
...more nuanced: All he and the Clinton Administration were trying to do with the 2000 bill, he claimed, was establish that interest-rate and currency swaps - two relatively uncontroversial forms of over-the-counter derivatives - couldn't be regulated as futures by the CFTC. At the time, credit-default swaps weren't on the radar, and the bill didn't prevent the Securities and Exchange Commission or bank regulators from stepping in with new rules...
They never did so, and Gramm acknowledged that the credit-default swaps market as it developed was "so opaque that nobody knew who was holding the bag." But he said he didn't buy that it was a major precipitating cause of the crisis. What was? "It was a confluence of two forces," he said. "Alone, neither would have created a cataclysm...
...would be nice to think the magnitude of the problems facing the nation would lead to a minimum of puerile contentiousness, but vile still seems to be the default position for some of Obama's noisier detractors - "Obama Flubs the Oath" was the inaccurate headline greeting the new President on the Drudge Report. Too many of us in the media remain reluctant "to set aside childish things." Happily, though, our new President seems to have an honest predilection for treating his opponents with respect. He seems intent on hearing their points of view and arguing, decorously, with them - that...
...Though he's capable of mirth, Cook's default facial expression is a frown, and his humor is of the dry variety. In meetings he's known for long, uncomfortable pauses, when all you hear is the sound of his tearing the wrapper of the energy bars he constantly eats." -Fortune...