After Alan Greenspan’s big admission that his intellectual edifice had crumbled, the journalistic world is on the lookout for other confessions from the prominent deregulators of the 1990s. Well, Phil Gramm isn’t going to comply:
“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.”
That’s from a page-one story in today’s NYT about Gramm. There actually aren’t all that many quotes from Gramm in the story. I would be interested to see the actual interview transcripts, but I suspect the reason he wasn’t quoted more is that he didn’t have anything remotely revelatory to say. Unlike Greenspan, Gramm strikes me as largely incapable of reexamination of his beliefs, or self-examination. Which is too bad, because I imagine that over the next few months and years we could use some prominent and articulate skeptics keeping watch over the re-regulation of the financial system. Gramm, because he still doesn’t seem to see any point in financial regulation at all, doesn’t really fit the bill.
