No matter who you are-investor, trader, homeowner, 401(k) holder, or CEO-you are bound to feel the impact of Alan Greenspan's “Age of Ignorance” for years to come.
According to MSN Money columnist William A. Fleckenstein, Greenspan's nearly 19-year career as Federal Reserve Chairman is even worse than anyone imagined. Labeled “Mr. Bubble” by the New York Times, Greenspan was nothing less than a serial bubble blower with a long history of bad decision-making. His famous “Greenspan Put” fueled the perception of a Goldilocks economy-but, as this explosive exposé reveals, the bear has finally caught up with Goldilocks.
Using transcripts of Greenspan's FOMC meetings as well as testimony before Congress, this eye-opening book delivers a timeline of his most devastating mistakes and weaves together the connection between every economic calamity of the past 19 years:
- The stock market crash of 1987
- The Savings & Loan crisis
- The collapse of Long Term Capital Management
- The tech bubble of 2000
- The feared Y2K disaster
- The credit bubble and real estate crisis of 2007
Fleckenstein explains just how far-reaching Greenspan's mess has been flung, and presents damning evidence that contradicts the former Fed chief's public naiveté concerning shifts in the market and economy. He also points to a disturbing fact, that throughout his career, Greenspan not only made costly mistakes, but made the same ones-over and over again. And not only was he never able to recognize or admit to those mistakes, he constantly rewrote his own history to justify them.
Greenspan's Bubbles offers a lock-stock-and-barrel portrait of a flawed but fascinating man whose words and actions have led a whole generation astray, and whose legacy will continue to challenge us in the years ahead.
from the review at Amazon
Of course those who are familiar with actual free market economics would know that Murray Rothbard had exposed Greenspan two decades ago.
A Minority Report: Alan Greenspan
by Murray Rothbard (8/87)
Greenspan's real qualification is that he can be trusted never to rock the establishment's boat. He has long positioned himself in the very middle of the economic spectrum. He is, like most other long-time Republican economists, a conservative Keynesian, which in these days is almost indistinguishable from the liberal Keynesians in the Democratic camp. In fact, his views are virtually the same as Paul Volcker, also a conservative Keynesian. Which means that he wants moderate deficits and tax increases, and will loudly worry about inflation as he pours on increases in the money supply.
There is one thing, however, that makes Greenspan unique, and that sets him off from his Establishment buddies. And that is that he is a follower of Ayn Rand, and therefore "philosophically" believes in laissez-faire and even the gold standard. But as the New York Times and other important media hastened to assure us, Alan only believes in laissez-faire "on the high philosophical level." In practice, in the policies he advocates, he is a centrist like everyone else because he is a "pragmatist."
As an alleged "laissez-faire pragmatist," at no time in his prominent twenty-year career in politics has he ever advocated anything that even remotely smacks of laissez-faire, or even any approach toward it. For Greenspan, laissez-faire is not a lodestar, a standard, and a guide by which to set one's course; instead, it is simply a curiosity kept in the closet, totally divorced from his concrete policy conclusions...
Over the years, Greenspan has, for example, supported President Ford's imbecilic Whip Inflation Now buttons when he was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Much worse is the fact that this "high philosophic" adherent of laissez-faire saved the racketeering Social Security program in 1982, just when the general public began to realize that the program was bankrupt and there was a good chance of finally slaughtering this great sacred cow of American politics. Greenspan stepped in as head of a "bipartisan" (i.e. conservative and liberal centrists) Social Security Commission, and "saved" the system from bankruptcy by slapping on higher Social Security taxes...
...And as icing on the cake, they know that Greenspan's "philosophical" Randianism will undoubtedly fool many free market advocates into thinking that a champion of their cause now perches high in the seats of power.
read the entire essay
Another take on Greenspan
The result of this has been to increase the willingness of investors to participate in speculative bubbles because they know that if things go wrong and they are unable to get out before the bubble burst, their good friend Alan Greenspan will bail them out and limit their losses. Greenspan has thus been responsible for bubbles like the tech stock bubble and the housing bubble both by suppressing interest rates and providing the "liquidity" needed to create the bubbles, and also by reducing investors fear of losses after the bubble bursts by creating the expectations that the Fed will bail them out.
The consequences of this have been great. Instead of falling as a result of increased production, the consumer price index rose nearly 74% between August 1987 and November 2005, an average annual increase of 3.1%...
Greenspan's policy of inflating bubbles to counter the negative effects of the bursting of previous ones is like someone who remains on a sinking ship because he doesn't like to swim.
read the entire essay
Greesnpans' reputation has taken a well deserved beating since his days (late 2000) when nearly everyone thought he was
"the maestro of the rock-solid prospering American economy."
