The Washington Post reports that Robert Litan, an economist at the Brookings Institution and a Clinton administration official, is an "unlikely defender" of Phil Gramm, a former senator and top economic adviser to John McCain. It's not clear why anyone would view Litan's defense as surprising. Litan has been a vocal advocate of deregulation in many industries. In fact, he headed up a major project with the conservative American Enterprise Institute on deregulation that published papers and books. It would have been surprising if Mr. Litan was not sympathetic to Mr. Gramm's efforts to reduce regulation in the financial sector.
--Dean Baker
