Word: greenspans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Everywhere you turn these days, there's cause for panic. The news is filled with talk of a global credit crisis. American homeowners are defaulting on their loans and housing-related stocks have crashed. The dollar is doing a disappearing act. Alan Greenspan, after years of artful obfuscation, has suddenly discovered a terrifying gift for clarity, warning that inflation will rise and house prices will tumble. Stock market volatility has surged. And now, feeding fears that the contagion is spreading, the British bank Northern Rock has suffered a near-death experience...
...been out of office for more than a year and a half now--and has spent, by his own account, a notable amount of that time in the bathtub. Yet many Americans still want to believe that Alan Greenspan is in charge of the economy...
...olden times, mainly the late 1990s, faith in Greenspan's omnipotence was expressed almost exclusively in positive terms. He was the "maestro," as Bob Woodward dubbed him in a best-selling book; the senior member of the "Committee to Save the World," as this magazine put it in a 1999 cover story; the Federal Reserve chairman who didn't just preside over the longest economic expansion in U.S. history but also was credited with somehow willing it to happen...
THAT A REAL ESTATE BUST MIGHT LAND US IN a recession is in a way fitting because it was a real estate boom that kept the last recession, in 2001, so brief and shallow. Trying to stave off deflation in the wake of the stock-market crash, Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve cut the short-term interest rates that determine what homeowners pay on adjustable-rate mortgages. Meanwhile, investors desperate for someplace other than the stock market to put their money piled into mortgage securities, driving down the cost of fixed-rate loans. Housing markets, already doing well amid...
...first big global liquidity crisis came a few years later, on the morning after the 1987 stock-market crash. Fearful banks stopped lending until new Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan restored confidence with reassuring words and piles of cash. Greenspan did the same when credit markets froze after the Russian government defaulted on its debts in 1998. But he was criticized afterward for being perhaps too generous and reassuring and for launching an era of overly easy money...