John McCain will tell you that if you’re against government bailouts of the private sector, he’s your man. But check out McCain’s track record on the three major bailouts engineered by the Fed this year alone:
John McCain, on the Bear Stearns bailout (March 2008):
“Asked whether the Fed went too far in helping Bear Stearns, McCain said: “It’s a close call, but I don’t think so.” He said he doesn’t support federal bailouts unless it has catastrophic effects on the entire financial marketplace and there were indications that a Bear Stearns failure would have rippled across the entire economy.”
McCain, on the Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae bailout (July 2008):
“With combined obligations of roughly $5-trillion, the rapid failure of Fannie and Freddie would be a threat to mortgage markets and financial markets as a whole. Because of that threat, I support taking the unfortunate but necessary steps needed to keep the financial troubles at these two companies from further squeezing American families.”
McCain, earlier this week on the AIG bailout:
“Now on the bailout itself, I didn’t want to do that. And I don’t think anybody I know wanted to do that. But there are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investment, whose insurance were at risk here. They were going to have their lives destroyed because of the greed and excess and corruption.”
Fair enough. But here’s what McCain had to say about bailouts just this morning:
U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain admonished the Federal Reserve Friday to get out of the business of bailouts and get back to managing money supply and protecting the purchasing power of the dollar.
“The Federal Reserve should get back to its core business of responsibly managing our money supply and inflation,” the Arizona senator told a group of business leaders in Wisconsin, an electoral battleground state.
“It needs to get out of the business of bailouts.”
Once the Fed gets through with all these bailouts McCain is supporting, it better get back to its real business!
