Word: greenspans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lower than they were last autumn, and they may be headed lower still. Lehman Bros., Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank all predict that the benchmark short-term federal-funds target rate - at just 1.75% - will go to 1% by the end of the year as Fed Chairman "Sir" Alan Greenspan (soon to be knighted for his role in the global economy) dons armor against the double-dip recession dragon. A quarter-point cut could come this week. A lower fed-funds rate is bad news for savers. Yields on things like money-market funds and short-term bank CDs, already...
...Boomers are in their prime earning years and are eager to move up to larger digs or acquire a vacation home. And best of all, interest rates are low. "We've looked at the bubble question, and we've concluded that it is most unlikely," Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told the House Financial Services Committee on July...
Those who fret about a bubble point out that housing prices did not even hiccup during last year's recession, suggesting that they exist in their own inflated orbit. After all, more than a million jobs were lost, and homes still sold at a record pace. Greenspan was worried enough to study the issue, as have numerous other economists, including Kevin Hassett for his new book, Bubbleology. But like the Fed chief, Hassett concluded that the rise in home prices made sense even through the recession. "A bubble is when there is no right answer," Hassett says. "In this case...
...normal. The national backlog reached 9.2 months in the 1990 recession but today stands at just 4.8 months. The upshot: even if demand slackens, prices can hold if sellers simply wait a normal length of time for the right buyer to surface. Increasingly, that buyer is a new American. Greenspan can get breathless describing "the incredible rise in immigration," which he says accounts for "a third of the rise in household formation" and "has been a major factor holding the price level of homes up." Today more than 1 in 10 Americans is foreign-born, compared with...
...economy, on paper at least, is chugging along. "Wages, employment, housing, retail sales--they all suggest a very solid economy," Lindsey told TIME. Why get in the way of that? It's a view Greenspan also articulated last week. But the Bush team's inaction is drawing unfavorable comparisons with President Clinton's team of Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, a Wall Street star, and Larry Summers, the high-wattage Harvard economist. Yet, as a Bush adviser notes, Rubin didn't meddle either and got help from a bull market: "When people were getting 25% return on their investments...