Word: slowdowns
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...Greenspan has left Bush a handy platform in the meantime. A growing chorus of economists think Greenspan's last half-point hike in May was overkill, and that the slowdown is indeed happening too fast. The markets are demanding a full point of interest rate cuts from the Fed chairman in the next six months, and many expect him to begin with a surprise, pre-FOMC-meeting cut in the next few weeks, coming perhaps as soon as the next unemployment figures, due out in early January. That would only help Bush set a properly gloomy mood...
...description, Greenspan's main obsession is fighting inflation.) But Greenspan is fully aware that this business cycle, even in its current flattened form, is closer to the trough than the apex, and that's largely his doing. Tax cuts may not be the answer to the slowdown, but they probably wouldn't hurt...
...Greeenspan finds himself making emergency rate-cuts this winter to soften the slowdown that he himself started, it may be hard for him to deny an incoming Republican president his pet project, as long as Bush is both sensible and polite about it. After putting Clinton (and himself) in the Fiscal Policy Hall of Fame, though, he's not going to rubber-stamp a tax cut because George Bush's son asks him to, even if young George sends mutual friends to do the asking. Greenspan has a legacy of his own to worry about...
...Greenspan that gets blamed if those six tightenings ending last spring put the boom into convulsions, but the Fed chairman figures that a slowdown would be much easier to bear - and modulate - than, say, stagflation, and that he can always slash short-term rates in January and beyond if things look dire...
...What happened? Bad weather in the Midwest and Southeast kept shoppers home; rising fuel prices kept their budgets tight. There was that whole presidential election thing. And as George W. Bush has been so studiously pointing out, we're in the middle of an economic slowdown. And shoppers, who account for two-thirds of the U.S. economy, know...