Word: greenspans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Such adroitness comes naturally to a Fed chairman who has been in political training all his life and has managed to serve an extraordinary number of masters. A former student of the Juilliard school of music and a disciple of libertarian thinker Ayn Rand, Greenspan first entered politics as a domestic adviser to Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign and rose to hold key economic posts under five Presidents. He suffered his greatest embarrassment in 1985 when, as a private economist, Greenspan wrote letters to regulators and Congress endorsing Charles Keating and his Lincoln savings and loan. Lincoln subsequently collapsed...
...Greenspan succeeded Paul Volcker as Fed chairman in 1987. Experts give him high marks for providing ample credit to the financial community and thereby helping overcome disasters ranging from the crash of '87 to the near collapse of the banking industry when it was saddled in the late 1980s with bad real estate loans. Notwithstanding his bookish appearance, Greenspan has long been a fixture on the Washington cocktail circuit, where he has squired such high- profile and politically connected companions as ABC newswoman Barbara Walters and NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell...
Kevin Phillips, author and former Republican political theorist, sees Greenspan as "sort of the financial equivalent of an operative instead of a statesman. He may know all the players, but he has a strain of intertwined parochialisms -- Republican strategist; Ayn Rand devotee; Wall Street forecaster; writer of letters for special pleaders like Keating. It isn't the background of a great economic statesman. It's the profile of an Austro- Hungarian court figure...
...Greenspan will continue to have more influence over interest rates than anyone else, at least until his term expires in March 1996. For now, Fed watchers expect the board to avoid any more rate increases until May at the earliest, to give the jittery markets a chance to calm down. The former jazz player who chairs the Fed hardly wants to provoke investors into another round of blowing their cool...
Things are good. The U.S. is lean and mean and at peace. Free trade is a priority, as are deficit reduction and education. Technology races ahead. We have a smart guy running the Federal Reserve (Greenspan) and another smart guy (Robert Rubin) advising the President -- who's damn smart himself. All of this bodes well. But the stock market in the short term doesn't care about any of that. It cares mainly about interest rates. You can argue that with the economy finally in gear, commodity prices and labor costs will begin to edge up. (Could the Teamsters strike...