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Whereas Ms. Gramm's responsibility on the CFTC was to monitor trade practices, she appears to have disabled it for Enron. While Ms. Gramm was in charge of the CFTC, she gave Enron a special exemption in trading energy derivatives and exempted future energy contracts from regulation as well. This kind of laissez-faire approach towards the energy futures market was approved by the same agency whose purpose is to monitor those kinds of trading activities. Nonetheless, this policy shift towards Enron was backed with the full faith and guarantee of the regulatory agency that the George Bush, Sr. charged Ms. Gramm with overseeing. .
Enron awarded Ms. Gramm's loyalty to their agenda with an invitation to become a board member of Enron, where she would be closely involved with their auditing procedures. Making this transition from the CFTC to Enron allowed one of her hands to permit Enron to skirt certain CFTC regulations that were vital to Enron's own interest, while the other hand put new non-regulated practices into motion as an Enron executive. Here, it should be noted that her term on the Enron board began approximately a month after she left the CFTC (Herbert 18).
The senator's wife's diligence and teamwork for Enron paid off well. Wendy Gramm received somewhere close to $1,000,000 in Enron perks and cash from 1993-2001. In 1992, Ms. Gramm cashed in an additional $276,912 in Enron stock (Schemers). This payout is now mentioned against her in a banking lawsuit that charges the former CFTC chairwoman in connection with 'insider trading' (Amalgamated).
Ms. Gramm replied that she sold the stock to fend off any conflict of interest allegation, since her husband headed the Senate Banking Committee. However, her "conflict of interest" perception was not troubled when Senator Phil Gramm mightily pushed through a 1998 law exempting Enron from several more federal regulations, over the objections of President Clinton, and in 2000 when her husband championed a bill through Congress that "exempted" energy commodity trading from "public disclosure" (Herbert 18).