Word: greenspan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Alan Greenspan really the root of all economic evil? Uh, no. By general agreement, the main jobs of the Federal Reserve are to halt financial panics before they spiral into depressions and to keep inflation from getting out of hand. The Fed has failed miserably at each of these tasks once--depression prevention in the early 1930s and inflation prevention in the 1970s. Under Greenspan, it took care of both pretty well. Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, an economist with no particular loyalty to the former maestro, estimates that of 36 significant interest-rate decisions during Greenspan...
...Greenspan is the first to proclaim that his job was made dramatically easier by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the technology-fueled transformation of global business and the long decline in the price of oil and other commodities. He was not a magician, just a very competent central-bank chief with a knack for being in the right place at the right time (not only at the Fed: as a young man, he studied music alongside future saxophone great Stan Getz, learned statistics from the guy who devised the Index of Leading Economic Indicators and thought his first deep...
...very success of the Greenspan years at the Fed, though, created a new set of problems. One was that investors and lenders, convinced that inflation and depression were no longer serious threats--and that the chairman would bail them out of any trouble they stumbled into--became heedless of risk. This has added a hard-to-master new responsibility to the job description of Fed chairman: restrainer of financial-market euphoria. But again, it's the product of success...
More troubling was the elevation of Greenspan to all-purpose economic guru, which he seemed to welcome. His incomprehensible pronouncements about monetary policy weren't a problem; his perfectly comprehensible comments about matters not directly related to Fed policy were...
Consider what happened five days into the Bush presidency in 2001 when the spending-averse Greenspan told a Senate committee that government surpluses were getting so huge, a tax cut was probably a good idea. Given the state of knowledge at the time, this wasn't an unreasonable argument--and when the surpluses became deficits, Greenspan changed his tune. But Democratic critics said his words provided cover for the President and Congress to squander the fruits of a decade of fiscal responsibility in months. While this exaggerates Greenspan's influence, it isn't entirely wrong, and Greenspan admits as much...