Herman Cain, the former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, says that if were president, and major American banks were in financial trouble, he would “let them fail.”
Cain, who initially supported the Troubled Assets Relief Program in October 2008, tells NRO that his position on bank bailouts has evolved. “We were in this financial meltdown like I had never seen before in my business career,” he explains. “I don’t think the typical American understood just how dangerous that was, not only for this country, but for the world.”
“The concept of the government providing assistance to the banking system, to help them get their act back together, I did support,” Cain says. “What I didn’t support was how they implemented it, how they carried it out.”
I'm with Cain. We took the "too big to fail" problem and made it worse -- the banks we rescued were consolidated are now even bigger.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse“The concept of the government providing assistance to the banking system, to help them get their act back together, I did support,” Cain says.
THAT is the problem. Not how they implemented it or carried it out.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt's easy to say *now*.
Not that we're out of the woods by any means, but no one knows what the world would have looked like had the big banks failed.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"...if [he] were president, and major American banks were in financial trouble, he would 'let them fail.'"
Okay, can agree or disagree. But then comes this...
"'The concept of the government providing assistance to the banking system, to help them get their act back together, I did support,' Cain says."
Not a good deflection. Basically, it's that-was-then- this-is-now. Banks failing then was bad, banks failing now is fine.
This guy doesn't look major-league at all when pressed on policy. But with the ongoing Weiner roast, nobody will notice...for now.
But he's got to get better.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think you are not playing close enough attention to his words. He is saying if an individual bank failed now, let it fail. What we faced at the time was a system of banks collapsing all at once in domino fashion. It may not have been pretty, but coordinated intervention was necessary in that case to prevent the entire ship from going down.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis shows a dangerous naivete on the part of the 2008 Cain. The entire disagreement between progressivism and conservatism boils down to whether you can sit down and confidently script future events to your liking.
Of course any bailout was always going to be executed in a capricious, partisan, unpredictable, non-optimal manner. That the TARP-supporting Cain could have ever assumed it would instead be a fair, logical, and orderly process is not a recommendation.
Hopefully his point is that he now sees the folly of the perfectability of mankind idea in its entirety - not merely that he has learned his lesson about one past misguided bailout, one time. He is still one of the better ones out there, but with his inexperience I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon unless his theory is almost letter-perfect going forward.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse>"no one knows what the world would have looked like had the big banks failed."
No one knows that the world would have looked like had GM been allowed to go under either. But that's not a convincing argument in favor of the GM bailout, and its not a convincing argument in favor of the bank bailout.
If the banks cannot be allowed to fail then we should do in law what we've already done in practice - nationalize them.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbusePassing this through my secret decoder ring: "I don't expect any money from Goldman-Sachs anyway".
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSomething tells me if this was said by mitt it would be called a flip-flop, with some reference made to a fish or piece of footwear. But Cain gets a relative pass, by noting that his position has simply evolved. Good grief!
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