“Two years ago, I warned that the oversight of Fannie and Freddie was terrible, that we were facing a crisis because of it, or certainly serious problems,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told CBS this morning. “The influence that Fannie and Freddie had in the inside the Beltway, old boy network, which led to this kind of corruption is unacceptable and I warned about it a couple of years ago.”
How does this claim of foresight square with this interview that McCain gave to the Keene (NH) Sentinel, discussing the subprime mortgage crisis, in December 2007?
Q: “Well the dimension of this problem may be surprising to a lot of people, but to many people, to many others there were feelings that there was something amiss, something was going too fast, something was a little too hot. Going back several years. Were you one of them? Or, I mean you’re a busy guy, you’re looking at a lot of things, maybe subprime mortgages wasn’t something you focused on every day. Were you surprised?
McCain: “Yeah. And I was surprised at the dot-com collapse and I was surprised at other times in our history. I don’t know if surprised is the word, but…
Q: “S&Ls?”
McCain: “I don’t — what did you say?”
Q: “The S&Ls.”
McCain: “Yeah, the S&Ls.”
Q: “Is this bigger than that?
McCain: “I don’t know the dimensions of this. It’s hard to know what the dimensions are. As I say, I never thought I’d pick up the paper and see a city in Norway is somehow dramatically impacted by it. When I say ‘surprised’ I’m not surprised when in capitalist systems that there’s greed and excess. I think it was Teddy Roosevelt who said ‘unfettered capitalism leads to corruption’ or something like that, that people have disputed for years.
“But so, in this whole new derivative stuff, and SIBs and all of this kind of new ways of packaging mortgages together and all that is something that frankly I don’t know a lot about.
Three full years before that, one Congressman did warn us, the supposed nutjob Ron Paul hit the nail on the head in 2003.
#10 “People already could see this happening FIVE YEARS AGO, yet nothing was done to prevent it. If anything, this type of behavior was encouraged!”
Actually, after that legislation was introduced but was shot down. Obama voted against this.
Also, the head of Obama’s VP search comm. was a former CEO of Fannie or Freddie. In addition, Obama is #2 in the Senate for taking campaign contributions from those two institutions…
If you’re going to comment on it, McCullough, you may notice he was speaking on the Senate floor and encouraged the Senate to pass the reform legislation before Senate. THE BILL WAS KILLED by the DEMOCRATS.
It helps TO READ.
# 21 Paddy-O
The S. 190 [109th]: Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 legislation was never voted on you dumb ass!
The housing crisis also has a root in the whole push for boosting housing for poor people that came from the likes of Barack Obama and his community organizers. The CRA is a culprit, and the higher interest rates and easy lending sent things over.
#22, Matt,
Although you should also see #23, “J”‘s post, you overlook something.
The Republicans controlled the Senate with a comfortable majority. They controlled the House with a comfortable majority. They controlled the White House. So how the hell did the Democrats “kill” the bill?
Naa, don’t answer. No sense making yourself look more idiotic than you already are.
Welcome to the real America…Capitalistic Socialism! A place where a small percentage of the population is allowed to manipulate the rules to become individually wealthy but are allowed to spread their individual risk losses to the rest of the populace. A place where welfare for the poor is considered parasitic but welfare for the rich and powerful is considered progress and a solution. It’s deplorable that our government’s solution to solve unregulated corporate greed is to absorb all their financial mistakes and corrupted actions to prevent justifiable bankruptcies and thus allowing these business leaders to escape not only conviction but to allow them to retain the majority of their financial gains from their excessive greed. The message: You’re company is too big and powerful to be held accountable for your bad decisions and the government will be here to bail you out the next time…and as a result, there will be a next time. I guess everyone hopes that the increases in the stock market from these bailouts will help offset the price of $20 a gallon milk from the resulting inflation…of course that’s if you have the excess money to invest and don’t lose it in the stock market to other government sanctioned corruption due to not responding to obvious abuses in the system. When will the Republicans learn that DEREGULATION DOESN’T WORK IN THE LONG RUN? Every game requires a set of rules or you get a destabilizing mad free-for-all and it’s always the little guy that pays the price in the end for these irresponsible policies of business self-regulation. It’s obvious that no one really cares about the level of the deficit so why should anyone care about government fraud like Medicare? The American coffers are open and obviously unlimited [via Paulson] so go get yours as the “reward mistakes” for big business should apply fairly to the people also. This is the last time I will ever look at welfare as a negative thing…just a “small corporation” looking to get treated the same as big corporations!
PS. The Bush Administration has ironically now turned America into a true socialistic country with their policies of taking over and owning public companies. Capitalism in America is officially dead and to think the conservatives modestly said it couldn’t be done! Now we’ll eventually see if it is true that it’s the “transitional stage between capitalism and communism”.