Herman Cain: Yes I Got It All Wrong About The Last Financial Crisis, But I’ve Got The Next One Covered (VIDEO)

Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain
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Fresh off the 9-9-9-focused debate in New Hampshire Tuesday, Herman Cain appeared on MSNBC Wednesday morning to talk about his plan and tout his economic expertise.

That didn’t go so great.

Host Chuck Todd grilled Cain about some of his past statements about the economy that, well, turned out to be flat wrong. To wit:

• In 2005, Cain wrote a column strongly arguing that there was no housing bubble. Here’s what it that sounded like:

I wish that was all. Its not. You could write a book just on how poor the coverage has been of the alleged housing bubble. The media have been foretelling a massive bust in housing prices for months now. On May 19, ABCs Elizabeth Vargas said: The run up in housing prices is now beginning to look something like the boom in Internet stocks, and we know what happened there. That kind of ignorance makes homeowners fear that their most expensive possession could turn worthless overnight. That won’t happen.

Whoops! Cain told Todd that, yeah, maybe he was a little off the mark there.

“What I missed in 2005 was just how bad Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had distorted the housing market. That’s why I said what I said in ’05,” he said. “I honestly did not realize just how bad it was, just how bad the whole bonding and derivatives thing was and we were on the brink of a total financial meltdown. I learned later on by looking into it deeper that the situation was a lot worse than i thought in 2005.”

• On Sept. 1, 2008, Cain wrote another column claiming the doomsayers about the economy were way off:

The supposed failure of Bush’s economic policies has been a constant theme of the Democrats since the 2006 elections, when the Democrats regained control of the House and Senate by convincing enough of the voters that the economic sky was falling, and that the war in Iraq could not be won. Based on all of their convention speeches, they plan to continue those themes right through Election Day on November 4. They are counting on a gullible and uninformed electorate to win the White House and a larger majority in Congress.

A couple weeks later, Lehman Bros. collapsed and a large chunk of the economic sky fell to Earth.

D’oh. Watch Cain explain what happened that time, and how he plans on preventing similar bad predictions in the future:

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