Hotmail
'Meet the Press' transcript for March 29, 2009
Broadcast videos, highlights |
 Netcast The economic crisis and the President's plan to shore up the banking system: In his first live Sunday morning interview, we speak with the man charged with heading up the effort, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Plus, an exclusive interview on the economy and foreign policy with President Obama's former rival for the White House, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). |
Exclusively on msnbc.com |
MR. GREGORY: Time magazine this week has its cover, and it's very interesting. I want to put it up on the screen for our viewers to see. "The End of Excess: Why the crisis is good for America." And there's a big red "reset" button. And everybody talks about reset. Obviously this is not a good crisis for America right now. But take a longer view. In the long run, is this crisis necessary for this economy?
SEC'Y GEITHNER: I think the adjustment to a period of excess is necessary. You never, you never want to have a crisis to remind people of the importance of living within your means, not borrowing too much or why regulation of the...(unintelligible)...is important. You never want to have a crisis that's damaging to make that point. But we're going to emerge stronger than this. When we get through this people are going to care less about what they make, more about what they do, what they achieve with what they make, and that will help make this country stronger.
MR. GREGORY: Will the economy be fundamentally different? Will people own fewer homes? I mean, home ownership, will that go down? Will consumption change? Will our lives change in a meaningful way?
SEC'Y GEITHNER: I think people will be living within their means more, which is helpful. We want to have, you know, a stronger, more sustainable recovery. Not a recovery based on a artificial boom that's not going to be sustained. We need to end this, this, this pattern of having booms and busts at the kind of frequency we've seen. That has to change. And that'll make the, that'll make this a better place to live and a more productive economy going forward.
MR. GREGORY: Before you go, it's been a fairly bumpy ride for you so far. You've had Republicans calling for you to resign. Some on Wall Street have questioned your effectiveness. Do you think at this stage you've been able to shore up your credibility as not only a steward for economic policy, but as a spokesman for the president's policies?
SEC'Y GEITHNER: David, when I came into this job I knew two things. One is I knew we were starting with a set of enormously complicated challenges and a deep sense of anger and frustration about the burden Americans were bearing because of a long period of excessive risk taking. And I knew we were going to face really tough choices. We were going to have to do things that are going to be deeply unpopular, hard to understand. We're not going to get it perfect everywhere. But this is a great privilege for me, a great honor to help this president do what it takes to help get this economy back on track. This job, it comes with a lot of heat by definition and there's nothing surprising in that. But we have a great moment of opportunity for this country and it is, again, a great privilege for me to be part of an effort to try to make sure we put in place a stronger economy, stronger financial system for the future.
MR. GREGORY: Secretary Geithner, good luck with your very important work.
SEC'Y GEITHNER: Thank you. Nice to see you.
MR. GREGORY: Appreciate you being here.
Coming next...
(Videotape)
PRES. OBAMA: I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
(End videotape)
MR. GREGORY: ...President Obama lays out his strategy in Afghanistan. We'll get reaction from his 2008 opponent on the way forward in that country; plus, his take on the economic crisis. An exclusive interview with Senator John McCain coming up next here on MEET THE PRESS.
(Announcements)
MR. GREGORY: An exclusive interview with Senator John McCain after this brief station break.
(Announcements)
MR. GREGORY: Senator McCain, welcome back to MEET THE PRESS.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN (R-AZ): Thanks, David.
MR. GREGORY: Very, very nice to have you here.
SEN. McCAIN: Nice to be back.
MR. GREGORY: You just heard Secretary Geithner. What's your level of confidence in him?
SEN. McCAIN: Well, I have some confidence in him. I think he's very smart. And I hope that this new plan--which, by the way, I thought was well-described...
MR. GREGORY: Good.
SEN. McCAIN: ...earlier--will work. My preference would have been to go in and, you know, with stress testing these banks and go ahead and sell off the--take the toxic assets and sell them off, and then let the good asset banks continue. But this proposal, I hope it works. We all want it to work. But what I'm most worried about is laying a debt on future generations of Americans. The, the multitrillion-dollar debts, unprecedented debts that we are--we are committing generational theft. I'm confident that the economy will recover. The question is after it recovers, what kind of a debt are we going to carry which will cause us to print money, inflation, and go through a worse wringing out than we went in the late 1970s and early '80s?
MR. GREGORY: And I want to ask you specifically about the debt in just a moment.
SEN. McCAIN: Mm-hmm.
MR. GREGORY: But more generally, in terms of fixing of the economy, fixing the financial industry, if you look at all of the programs that the government has now put in place, do you think they got the prescription right?
SEN. McCAIN: Well, I hope they do with this plan. I think the markets reacted well. And I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that it gave us a little optimism that there was a plan that people could understand, that was coherent, that might lead us out of this mess that we are in. So there was a great deal of incoherency for a long time, beginning with Secretary Paulson saying the TARP money would be used to...
MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.
SEN. McCAIN: ...on the home loan mortgage crisis, and then switch to financial institutions. And it seemed that every few days there was a target du jour, and that obviously eroded dramatically any confidence that Americans might have.
MR. GREGORY: Do you think that the banks will need more government money, and would you be willing to support that?
SEN. McCAIN: I would not unless I certainly saw a way that it would not be used the--as the first TARP money was. I think that's the general opinion throughout the Congress on both sides of the aisle. There's got to be more transparency. You didn't ask him, but the secretary of Treasury I understand will not reveal is how much money is left in TARP 1. Don't you think the American people should know that? There--we still don't have the transparency and oversight.
One other thing we need, we do need a select committee in Congress to look at what happened so people can--this train hit them without any knowledge. They still don't know what happened. Why did it happen? So then they would have some more confidence on, in what actions we might take in the future to prevent it from happening again.
MR. GREGORY: And what is your take on the anger, the populist anger in the country? Do you think it's justified, or do you think it's been overblown? Has the president showed leadership in standing up to it?
SEN. McCAIN: I think the president was trying to walk a careful line between reflecting public anger--which is all justified. It's all justified, ranging from the extreme of Madoff to just outright greed and people who knew better. So I think he was trying to walk a fine line between rechanneling and reflecting anger, at the same time not bashing people that are innocent. I think that, that what we need to do here is understand, too, that sometimes Congress overreacts. I share all that anger. My constituents share that anger. It's, it's real, it's palpable and it's justified. But bills of attainder, basically going back and taxing people for what they've already by contract earned or are going to earn, I think is a dangerous course of action as well.
MR. GREGORY: Let me ask you for your assessment of your former opponent in the presidential race and now president, Obama. This is what you said on election night. Let's watch.
(Videotape, November 4, 2008)
SEN. McCAIN: I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together, to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences.
(End videotape)
MR. GREGORY: Have Republicans heeded that call, and do you think President Obama has heeded that call?
SEN. McCAIN: I think neither side, perhaps, has done it as much as maybe we should. But you establish an environment. Really, bipartisanship is sitting down across a table from each other and negotiating, recognizing there's got to be compromise. And in all due respect to the incoming administration, the speaker said, "We won. We wrote the bill." There was never any serious negotiations over the stimulus package, over the omnibus spending bill. Now there doesn't seem to be any on the budget. Those are all party line votes. There's not the negotiations. And I--look, I'll take blame on our side for maybe not being more forthcoming, but really the president does beat the drum and sets the pace. And so far there has not been not an instance where they sat down across the table and said, "OK, what do you want? What are you demanding here? What do you think is best?" And including some of those concerns as we come--as we move forward with really large, encompassing packages about the future of this country.
MR. GREGORY: Instead, the administration has...
SEN. McCAIN: I--could I say--could I just also say, though...
MR. GREGORY: Yes.
- Discuss Story On Newsvine
-
Rate Story:
View popularLowHigh - Instant Message
MORE FROM MEET THE PRESS |
 Meet the Press Section Front |
| Add Meet the Press headlines to your news reader: |
Sponsored links
Resource guide