When the House Financial Services Committee examines the sweeping overhaul of financial regulation on its fifth anniversary, legislators will first hear on Tuesday by former senator Phil Gramm, the New York Times reported today. Gramm was one of the chief architects of a comprehensive deregulation of the financial rules in the late 1990s. That led to the creation of mega-banks and looser oversight of financial derivatives, which some critics say laid the groundwork for the financial crisis. Gramm, an economist by training who served in the Senate from 1985 until 2002, has long opposed what he has viewed as overly broad government regulations.
