NEW YORK — President Bush fervently defended U.S.-style free enterprise Thursday as the cure for the world’s financial chaos, not the cause. He warned foreign leaders ahead of a weekend summit not to crush global growth with restrictive new rules.
“We must recognize that government intervention is not a cure-all,” Bush said from Wall Street, setting his own tone for the two-day meeting that begins today in Washington seeking solutions to the economic crisis that has spread around the world.
“Our aim should not be more government,” he said. “It should be smarter government.”
Bush acknowledged that governments share the blame for the severe economic troubles that have hit banks, homes and whole countries.
He spelled out his prescription, which includes tougher accounting rules and more modern international financial institutions. But he stopped short of the tighter oversight and regulation that European leaders want. All his ideas came with a warning: Don’t disturb capitalism.
“In the wake of the financial crisis, voices from the left and right are equating the free-enterprise system with greed, exploitation and failure,” Bush said.
“It is true that this crisis included failures, by leaders and borrowers, by financial firms, by governments and independent regulators,” Bush said. “But the crisis was not a failure of the free-market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system.”
That warning about the dangers of too much government intervention came not long after he championed the biggest bailout in U.S. history: a $700 billion taxpayer-funded plan to rescue the financial industry.
