Sen. Jim Bunning said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, by rescuing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is acting like China’s finance minister and that Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke should step down.
“I sincerely believe that Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke should resign,” Bunning, a Republican from Kentucky on the Senate Banking Committee, said in an interview Monday. “They have taken the free market out of the free market.”
Paulson and the federal regulator for Fannie and Freddie placed the two largest U.S. mortgage-finance companies in a government-operated conservatorship Sunday, ousting their chief executives and eliminating their dividends. Treasury also may purchase up to $200 billion of stock in the firms to keep them solvent.
“We no longer have a free market in the United States; we have a government-controlled free market,” Bunning said.
Bunning, 76, criticized Paulson’s successful effort in July to obtain congressional authority to pump unlimited amounts of money into Fannie and Freddie to keep them afloat.
