If You Like the Credit Crisis...

If you like the mortgage mess and the credit crisis it has brought on, then you'll really enjoy John McCain's likely pick for Secretary of Treasury -- former Texas senator (and close McCain friend) Phil Gramm. Throughout his career Gramm has "worked to weaken or remove regulations that allowed the government to keep an eye on big business."

He's known as "John McCain's brain on economic matters." He drafted the "economic plan" McCain is running on. He also drafted the two laws that brought us the Enron collapse and the current banking crisis:

Gramm orchestrated the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999 which “destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies.” He also pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000, which made legal “the mortgage swaps distancing the originator of the loan from the ultimate collector.” The Nation writes that “those two acts effectively ended significant regulation of the financial community.

As Princeton economist Paul Krugman says, "we could manage to have another Great Depression if we work at it hard enough. I think Phil Gramm might be just the guy to do it."