McCain's flip-flops on regulation

ABC News looks at McCain's long history of supporting deregulation of our financial markets and his abrupt flip-flop on the issue.

McCain, in fact, voted in favor of the very deregulation of insurance and banking firms that got us into this colossal mess:

[In 1999] McCain had joined with other Republicans to push through landmark legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Phil Gramm (Tex.), who is now an economic adviser to his campaign. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act aimed to make the country's financial institutions competitive by removing the Depression-era walls between banking, investment and insurance companies.

That bill allowed AIG to participate in the gold rush of a rapidly expanding global banking and investment market. But the legislation also helped pave the way for companies such as AIG and Lehman Brothers to become behemoths laden with bad loans and investments.

McCain now condemns the executives at those companies for pursuing the ambitions that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act made possible, saying that "in an endless quest for easy money, they dreamed up investment schemes that they themselves don't even understand."

(More here.)

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What do you think? Is McCain the guy to lead us out of this mess? The noise coming from his campaign tells me he hasn't got a clue.