Sept. 16 (Bloomberg) -- As Wall Street's financial crisis deepens, presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are looking to some of the nation's top economists for advice.

Obama yesterday held a phone call with one-time Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, who won praise a decade ago for helping avert other potential meltdowns, and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, credited with halting the raging inflation of the late-1970s and early-'80s.

McCain on Saturday talked with Harvard economics Professor Martin Feldstein, a onetime adviser to President Ronald Reagan, Stanford University economist John Taylor and former Hewlett- Packard Co. Chief Executive Carly Fiorina.

These advisers are helping shape the messages of Democrat Obama and Republican McCain, as the latest upheaval in the financial markets and the credit crisis begins to crowd out other issues on the campaign trail.

``You won't be able to get the economy moving again, create jobs, without fixing the mess in our financial system,'' said Obama economic adviser Jason Furman.

McCain ``has been calling for some time for a focus on the economy,'' Fiorina said in an interview.

Both campaigns argued that their candidate was first out of the gate in warning of the credit crisis, which led to the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. to Bank of America.

Power to the Fed

Obama's advisers point to a March speech in New York, in which he called for giving the Federal Reserve greater supervisory authority when it acts as a lender of last resort, strengthening the capital requirements for financial companies and streamlining the collection of overlapping regulatory agencies that oversee Wall Street.

``The main thing we're advising is the ideas he laid out as long as three years ago and as recently as March of this year are still the right ones to deal with our financial problems,'' Furman said in an interview.

Adviser Fiorina said McCain would address the situation by ``making sure that it never happens again.''

McCain, she said, has differed from President George W. Bush on this issue and consistently called for ``strong regulatory oversight of Wall Street.'' She said she doesn't think ``the worst is behind us yet.''

Obama, 47, an Illinois senator, yesterday said Bush's policies have caused ``the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression'' and called for ``modernizing'' regulations, at a rally in Grand Junction, Colorado.

`Clean Up Wall Street'

McCain vowed to ``clean up Wall Street'' and ``replace the outdated, patchwork quilt of regulatory oversight,'' at an event in Jacksonville, Florida. ``We will never put America in this position again,'' he said.

The Arizona senator, 72, told several thousand supporters that while these are difficult times, ``the fundamentals of our economy are strong.'' That prompted the Obama campaign to call the Republican nominee ``out of touch.''

The fallout from the financial markets is dominating the presidential race as Americans look to the candidates for solutions after Lehman, the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, filed for bankruptcy yesterday. The company lost 94 percent of its market value this year.

Shared Views

Neither Obama nor McCain has offered specific fixes. And the two campaigns are using similar language to blame regulators and the banks themselves for the mess.

That may stem from a view shared by their advisers that the situation may worsen and that it would be hard for the government to stay on the sidelines.

Rubin, in a Sept. 10 television interview with Charlie Rose, called these times ``probably the most complex and difficult since the 1930s in the financial markets.''

He said for the next year and a half ``we could be in a highly proactive mode'' on public policy. ``We should do whatever seems sensible and also accept undesirable side-effects if necessary in order to try to promote better economic conditions,'' he said.

Summers, another Obama adviser, said in the same interview that the situation ``isn't something we can ride out with the hope that somehow, in a deep sense, the fundamentals are strong.''

He said there will likely need to be ``more active interventions in the financial and housing markets than we've seen.''

System Is Broken

Volcker said at a Sept. 5 banking conference in Calgary that the U.S. financial system is broken and may contribute to the weakest expansion since the 1930s.

Some McCain advisers also foresee greater government involvement.

Feldstein, in an Aug. 26 Financial Times column, warned that ``the risk of a downward spiral of house prices is the primary danger facing the American economy.''

He proposed a federal program of ``mortgage replacement loans'' to provide financial incentives that would stop defaults among those who still have positive equity but face further price declines.

Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and now a Harvard professor, said the crisis ``had to happen'' because the financial system was ``bloated and overgrown and reckless to some extent,'' in an interview published Sept. 15 by Der Spiegel.

If the system continues to ``implode,'' he said, ``it's going to be very difficult for the Fed to step back and let all the banks go under. They're clearly going to have to throw taxpayer dollars in.''

Last Updated: September 16, 2008 00:01 EDT