SUMMARY: McCain spoke up after a widely read report drew attention to chicanery at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but it’s a huge stretch to suggest he could have somehow averted the current crisis.
The turmoil on Wall Street is prompting the presidential candidates to offer prescriptions for restoring order to U.S. financial markets. John McCain is using the opportunity to remind voters that he called on Congress to crack down on government-chartered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Appearing on CNN’s American Morning on Sept. 16, 2008, McCain sought to blame much of the crisis on Wall Street greed and inept or corrupt government regulators. “Ask any American citizen who has been the victim of a bureaucrat or a bureaucracy,” McCain said. “I said two years ago that the Fannie and Freddie thing was a very serious problem and we had to work on it. And I have always opposed greed of Wall Street and I know how we can fix this.”
McCain echoed his remarks later in the day during a speech in Tampa, saying, “Two years ago, I warned the administration and the Congress that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac needed to be fixed. It turns out, the problem was even bigger. They waited too long, and now we have a housing crisis, three bailouts with taxpayers’ money, and a financial crisis.”
In both appearances, McCain was referring to his 2006 decision to sign on to a Republican-led regulatory overhaul of the mortgage-financing firms, which both went through multibillion-dollar accounting scandals earlier in the decade. The occasion that prompted McCain’s involvement was the release of a 340-page report from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight that concluded that Fannie Mae had manipulated earnings and violated basic accounting principles. It describes an “arrogant and unethical corporate culture” in which executives were more concerned about their bonuses than meeting the company’s housing mission.
The findings, based on a 27-month investigation and resulting in a $400-million fine paid to the government, prompted McCain to join other critics and call for more scrutiny of Fannie and its sibling, Freddie Mac. “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole,” McCain declared in a May 26, 2006, news release.
So it’s true that McCain spoke out — after a widely read report drew attention to chicanery at the firms. But the implication in McCain's remarks is that his remarks in 2006 were in some way a warning about the financial markets disaster that struck in 2008. That strikes us as quite a stretch.
First of all, congressional efforts to increase oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac extend back to the early 1990s, making McCain a latecomer to the debate. The regulatory efforts proved unsuccessful because of Congress’ complicated relationship with the firms, whose dominance in the home financing market makes their stability critical to the economy.
