In 2002, McCain introduced a bill to deregulate the broadband Internet market, warning that "the potential for government interference with market forces is not limited to federal regulation." Three years earlier, McCain had joined with other Republicans to push through landmark legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Phil Gramm (Tex.), who is now an economic adviser to his campaign. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act aimed to make the country's financial institutions competitive by removing the Depression-era walls between banking, investment and insurance companies.
That bill allowed AIG to participate in the gold rush of a rapidly expanding global banking and investment market. But the legislation also helped pave the way for companies such as AIG and Lehman Brothers to become behemoths laden with bad loans and investments.
McCain now condemns the executives at those companies for pursuing the ambitions that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act made possible, saying that "in an endless quest for easy money, they dreamed up investment schemes that they themselves don't even understand.
Finding the sweet spot between appropriate regulation and over-regulation is tough, I realize. I'm not smart enough to know where that spot is. Neither, it appears, is John McCain.
3 comments:
"Finding the sweet spot between appropriate regulation and over-regulation is tough, I realize"
I believe such point doesn't exist and it will never exist. I guess there will be never anarcho-capitalism ruling the world and I believe there will never be communism too, so we have to get used to this system. Government does something, trying to "help" market, it works for some years, then it collapses, then government will do something else, it will work for some years, then collapse...and so on.
Regards,
Elli
This was a particularly challenging column, because how do you do justice to the nuances of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 200 to 250-word chunks? That's basically what we each have to work with. Those three grafs you posted takes up 161 words.
I dealt with the law in such a perfunctory way in the end, that I'm not certain readers will understand much about it, other than that you and I probably disagree about the law's virtues, but not McCain's mendacity.
ben, you're right. I had to lapse back into generalities, I'm afraid, to be able to make any kind of point at all. And I'll confess: I'm sometimes out of my comfort zone when getting into the tall grass on economic issues. I bet lots of writers are; I'm just admitting it.
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