Claudia, Everyone here should read the following:

http://race42008.com/2008/09/16/mccain-warned-of-fannie-mae-accounting-scandal-sought-reform-in-2006/

"There’s been a lot of posturing by the Obama campaign the past couple of days over the hits to the financial industry, and questioning of whether John McCain “gets it.”  He got it, all right.  The following is a statement made by Sen. McCain on the floor of the Senate on May 25, 2006, regarding the need to reform the housing finance industry, and particularly to bring greater accountability to Fannie Mae.  In summary, the bill, S. 190, of which John McCain was one of only four co-authors (Sen. Obama being none of the other three), proposed to amend the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992 to establish an independent Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Agency which would have authority over the Federal Home Loan Bank Finance Corporation, the Federal Home Loan Banks, the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac).  "I heard that yesterday, Palin made a speech in which she talked about regulating Wall Street, and a few breaths later talked about getting government out of Wall Street.The situation here is that McCain and as seen yesterday, Palin, may support some regulation and oppose other regulation, and they change their rhetoric depending on what they’re talking about and who the audience is.But if you look at the record, McCain made a call for regulation of financial firms two years ago. The link I’m posting here includes his statements before the Senate 

Damn mangling of my line breaks

Or my own post about it:
http://poligazette.com/2008/09/17/mccain-goes-to-war-over-economy-wall-street-fannie-mae-and-freddie-mac/

It’s clear that the narrative spread by Obama et al. is a lie.

He’s all for deregulation… providing it does not harm the American people. That’s what he has been all about throughout his career.

Unlike Barack "making up a record as we go" Obama.

Michael,

I think it would be an effective ad to show video of McCain’s senate statements in 2006.

And perhaps even end the ad with a clip Obama claiming McCain was against regulation before he was for it, and then the text "Oh Really?"

Yeah - if you find it, I run it.

Claudia;
Are you suggesting supporting regulations is an all or nothing proposition?  And to echo what was said above, in spite of his not being very good at economics, Sen. McCain does seem prescient in his attempts to reform Fannie/Freddie.

And for a bit of a snark, Sen. Obama certainly appreciates all of the Fannie/Freddie contributions prior to the collapse!

Well, Michael, the 2006 bill doesn’t change the fact that he was against regulation before he was for it, but just that this changed happened before the current crisis, not after it as Obama is insinuating. Of course, I like a person who can change his opinion.

I would really love to hear more about 2006 McCain’s reasons for doing this, and his stance on regulation then. Was this a form of compromise? McCain knew he couldn’t privatize frannie and freddie, which he later said he would want to do. Was it ’smart regulation is better than dumb regulation’? Was it more of an anti-corruption/lobbying move than an economic reform move? I think the last is the most likely given the full text of McCain’s floor speech.

Also, McCain’s regulation of frannie and freddie would basically be moot. All these regulations would have done is allow a director to set a higher capitalization ratio (basically he could have forced Freddie and Fannie to have more cash on hand, or write fewer loans). Frannie and Freddie probably still would have fallen, but maybe not as hard, and that is IF the director (who would probably become target #1 of freddie’s "lobbying") had decided to raise capatalization. The rest of the industry would continue the same, and any director would be mighty hard pressed to deviate significantly from the ‘industry standard’.

So, McCain might have had the right attitude, but he certainly didn’t "get it" in the sense that he proposed effective solutions to today’s problems.

To be fair, I haven’t given Obama’s proposals anything nearly as thruough of an examination, mostly because now I can’t find any of them, because every search about Frannie and Freddie comes back with this 2006 McCain bill. I remember him giving specifics in one speech or another, but not what they were….

Okay, trying some better google searches eventually got me to some more searches, it looks like Obama is referencing the Stop Fraud Act which he put to the floor just before McCain gave the speech people are talking about now. I’m looking over it now….

Equally as useless.

The underlying problem with the Mortage system wasn’t fraud, it was the one-two punch of excessive risk and uncertainty. People would wright risky mortages, and then package them in big groups in such a way that you didn’t know how risky any individual package was. This was perfectly legal behavior, it was just bad business.

Neither candidate seems to have a solution to either of those fundamental problems. You would either need to regulate how individual, private banks wrote mortgages, or regulate the transparency of mortgage bundles. The second one seems much more sensible to me, but neither of the candidates proposed either.

Equally as useless.
LOL - you know what… I think this is the case just about always. BTW: when youd o research like that, feel free to share the links with the rest of us I even might write something about it - disagreeing or agreeing with you, but a serious post.

. BTW: when youd o research like that, feel free to share the links with the rest of us I even might write something about it - disagreeing or agreeing with you, but a serious post.

Actually Greenspan had a nice write-up on it in his book.