Bumped again by Carol. Originally posted 2008-07-19 17:09:07 -0500; Originally promoted. -- GH

Stephen D reports on a Phil Gramm Friday night dump attributing Gramm's resignation from the McSame campaign to the "Americans are whiners!" comment. I think that is just cover for the more likely real reason:

UBS, LGT Helped Hide Assets, Evade Taxes, Senate Says

By David Voreacos and Carlyn Kolker

July 17 (Bloomberg) -- UBS AG and Liechtenstein bank LGT Group aided rich U.S. clients who wanted to disguise ownership of accounts and evade taxes on hidden assets, a Senate subcommittee said.

UBS, the world's largest wealth manager, hid as much as $17.9 billion for 19,000 Americans who didn't declare assets to the Internal Revenue Service, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a report released in Washington late yesterday. LGT, owned by Liechtenstein's ruling family, fostered a ``culture of secrecy and deception'' while assigning code names to U.S. clients, the panel said.

Remember that Phil Gram works for and lobbies for one arm of UBS in the USA. More below...

I received this from MoveOn and I thought I would pass it on.

We've been listening to John McCain and George Bush talk about the economy, and we've noticed a pattern: they keep saying the problems are all in our heads.

When George Soros’ new book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets; the Credit Crisis of 2008 was released, I was eager to read it. Not only does he have a great track record as a progressive but he has been a big (and successful) player in global financial markets. I fully intended to review the book, but before beginning I decided to check out what he had to say on the runaway escalation of oil and gas prices. And in the back of my mind there was the Phil Gramm story. McCain’s chief lobbyist until very recently was a paid lobbyist for UBS, a major Swiss bank which is reportedly in serious trouble. My guess paid off. Gramm is directly responsible for the present the series of economic bubbles which now threaten to bring down the entire U.S. economy.

My first step was to check out testimony given by Soros on June 3, to an Oversight Hearing on FTC Advanced Rulemaking on Oil Market Manipulation, held by the U.S. Senate. While disclaiming expertise on oil markets, he said that he was confident that his “life-long study of bubbles,” allowed him to understand how speculators were responsible for the recent sharp rise in the oil futures market and gasoline prices. By their intervention in these markets they reinforced a prevailing trend toward higher prices. He enumerated the underlying factors pushing the market up and then discussed the role of the financial institutions in creating a bubble.

The topic below was originally posted on my blog the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

Yet another lobbyist problem for McCain:

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s national campaign general co-chair was being paid by a Swiss bank to lobby Congress about the U.S. mortgage crisis at the same time he was advising McCain about his economic policy, federal records show.

MSNBC

Olbermann reported on this story Tuesday night, noting that Gramm served "as a lobbyist dealing specifically with legislation regarding the mortgage crisis as recently as Dec. 31, 2007."

Michael Greenberger, former Director of Trading and Markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), was interviewed by NPR’s Terry Gross this past Thursday, April 3. He explained that the sub-prime mortgage crisis was caused by financial derivatives, and that there are more crises coming, because there are many more financial derivatives out there. He notes that the one act of deregulation most to blame – even more to blame than the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act (the law passed in the First Great Depression to separate commercial banking from investment banking) is the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000, introduced on the sly by then Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), who is now the top economic advisor to John McCain:

And Greenberger warns that we are at the beginning of the financial crises, not the end.

When people tell you this is the worst economic crisis since World War Two, that’s a way of not saying the panicky thing, which is, we may be heading for a depression. And if a Bear Stearns collapses, you’re going back to 1929.

The [stock] market went up last week because there is the belief that Bear Stearns is the end. But there are some of us who are very worried that Bear Stearns is the beginning and not the end, and if we needed $30 billion to bail out Bear Stearns . . . .