Word: repealers
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...chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995 through 2000, Gramm was Washington's most prominent and outspoken champion of financial deregulation. He 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...
Gramm, who before he got into politics was an economics professor at Texas A&M, took to the task with relish. He was dismissive of the charge that Glass-Steagall repeal has been a big problem. "Europe never had Glass-Steagall," he said. "So why didn't this happen in Europe rather than here?" On derivatives he was a bit 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...
...Bush ended up igniting culture wars before they'd even had a chance to find their way around the office. Clinton entered the White House having tempered the skepticism of many pro-life voters with his insistence that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare." But his decision to repeal the Mexico City ban as one of his first acts in office led many to wonder if the slogan was just empty words. With Bush, his reinstatement of the ban and accompanying explanation signaled from the get-go that "compassionate conservatism" was still very much conservative. (Read "McCain and Obama...
Obama sought to avoid creating such political theater by waiting to issue his repeal of the policy until the annual face-off between pro-life and pro-choice advocates on Jan. 22 was over and by doing it out of sight of the cameras. He observed the anniversary of Roe v. Wade by issuing a statement reaffirming his support for a woman's right to choose but also appealing - as he did throughout the presidential campaign - for common-ground approaches to abortion policy: "We are united in our determination to prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the need for abortion, and support...
...retail-banking and credit-card juggernaut built by Wriston's protégé John Reed--combined with a certain amount of forbearance by bank regulators and a lot of cash from Saudi Arabia--enabled Citi to survive. Reed then agreed to a 1998 merger with Travelers Group, which necessitated congressional repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and established Citigroup as the greatest financial supermarket on earth...