Reading this article by Stephen Labaton on NYTimes.com Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt, and Risk I had an "Ah Ha" moment. I realized that McCain really does favor regulation...he's not lying when he says this.
He's being much more devious than that...
Here's the part I'm talking about:
The commission’s decision effectively to outsource its oversight to the firms themselves fit squarely in the broader Washington culture of the last eight years under President Bush.
A similar closeness to industry and laissez-faire philosophy has driven a push for deregulation throughout the government, from the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency to worker safety and transportation agencies.
"It’s a fair criticism of the Bush administration that regulators have relied on many voluntary regulatory programs," said Roderick M. Hills, a Republican who was chairman of the S.E.C. under President Gerald R. Ford. "The problem with such voluntary programs is that, as we’ve seen throughout history, they often don’t work."
McCain also supports voluntary regulation of Wall Street. His calls to fire Cox lay this position bare:
"The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the president and has betrayed the public’s trust. If I were president today, I would fire him," McCain says, according to excerpts for a speech on reforming the ailing U.S. financial markets he will deliver today in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
"The primary regulator of Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) kept in place trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino," McCain says."
From: McCain Calls for Firing of SEC Commissioner
So, according to McCain, the problem was Cox...not the inherently flawed voluntary regulation system he oversaw.
Here's what Cox had to say:
"The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work," he said in a statement. The program "was fundamentally flawed from the beginning, because investment banks could opt in or out of supervision voluntarily. The fact that investment bank holding companies could withdraw from this voluntary supervision at their discretion diminished the perceived mandate" of the program, and "weakened its effectiveness," he added.
From: S.E.C. Concedes Oversight Flaws Fueled Collapse
Calling for Cox to be fired is an attempt by McCain to cover up the true issue: the Republican experiment in voluntary regulation of Wall Street has abysmally failed.