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 The presidential candidates and members of Congress have the good fortune not to have any immediate responsibility for addressing the carnage on Wall Street, because judging by their knee-jerk comments from the campaign trail and Capitol Hill, it's probably the American economy's good fortune too.
Thursday Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain won the day's prize for comments inconsistent with his record when he told a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, audience if he were president he would fire Securities and Exchange Chairman Christopher Cox (pictured). McCain charged the former GOP congressman of sitting on his hands while a potential fire smoldered. "You can't wait any longer for more failures in our financial system," McCain is quoted in an AP report.
Never mind that Cox has presided over the SEC at a time when Republican policies held sway, including a period of relaxed capital requirements that allowed investment banks to become dangerously overleveraged. The policies in place mirror McCain's free-market philosophy as much as anyone's. President Bush appointed Cox to lead the SEC in 2005. He had been a Republican congressman from California for 17 years. AP suggested McCain was talking tough to counter comments from Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, who previously has mocked McCain for initially suggesting that Wall Street's woes be examined by a high-level commission. For hist part, Cox did not take the news lightly, and issued a response later in the day. "While I have great respect for Senator McCain, we have sometimes disagreed, and this is one such occasion," Cox said in a statement. "The SEC has made plain that we have zero tolerance for naked short selling." In truth, because of their inability to do anything immediate about the crisis and the lack of fallout, politicians are free to say anything they want about the crisis if it will help them win votes in November. Still, that hasn't stopped House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., from trying to appear frustrated. The Washington Post reports that she has "dispatched" House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., to determine whether federal regulators should retain authority to unilaterally bail out failing firms. - Bill McConnell See story about McCain from the Associated Press See story about Pelosi from The Washington Post Categories Deal Video
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