McCain wrote what would happen, and now; that is exactly what is happening.
Despite his recent claims that he saw it coming, truthfully, McCain is not all that confident in his own soothsaying abilities:
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..."
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The onus is on McCain to, at the very LEAST, clarify his real motivation for sponsoring that Act.
As for McCain's sponsoring of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, keep in mind that McCain voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act back in 1999, which was ultimately passed. (53 Republican Senators plus one Democrat - AYE, 44 Democrats no Republicans - NAY)
The man who wrote the legislation (Phil Gramm) was McCain's chief economic advisor and campaign co-chair up until 2 months ago, when he made the infamous "nation of whiners" remark and was forced to step down. He is still an advisor to McCain and remains close to the campaign. According to Fortune Magazine, most of McCain’s positions on the economy are “Vintage Gramm.”
The legislation written by McCain's economic advisor rescinded "the Depression era's divorce of commercial banking activities from investment banking, called the Glass-Stegall Act of 1933. That opened a floodgate of "creative" financial instruments backed by notes and other commercial paper. Much of the banking regulation of the Roosevelt administration — including abandonment of the gold standard — made absolutely no sense, but markets can fail with dire short-run consequences under a fiat monetary system. With Glass-Stegall, Congress put its finger on and mitigated the tendency and temptations of banks to create massive costly externalities to society, in this case, by holding bundled mortgage-backed securities which were deemed safe by rating agencies but which ultimately failed the market test."
...
"The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 would make perfect sense in a world regulated by a gold standard, 100% reserve banking, and no FDIC deposit insurance; but in the world as it is, this "deregulation" amounts to corporate welfare for financial institutions and a moral hazard that will make taxpayers pay dearly." --Robert B. Ekelund.
http://mises.org/story/3098
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Republicans, and many who simply call themselves fiscal conservatives for that matter, are in fact engaged in a brand of socialism. I like to call the practice "reverse socialism." Ekelund calls it corporate socialism.
Instead of advocating the highest income earners paying higher taxes in order to support social programs for those crippled by the economy, we have the government protecting free reign of financial institutions to enter high risk/high reward type ventures, knowing that the Republicans will be there to push through massive bail outs to save these corporations from their own greed, running huge defecits in the process and putting the US further into debt. The average taxpayer is relied upon to essentially reward the gross incompetence and recklessness of senior executives.
Stealing from the poor to give to the rich, courtesy of the architect of John McCain's economic policy.
