March 22, 2010
On Friday, March 19, former Federal Reserve chair, Alan Greenspan appeared before the Brookings Institution to present his 48-page paper entitled, “The Crisis”. The obvious subject of the paper concerned the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. With this document, Greenspan attempted to add his own spin to history, for the sake of restoring his tattered public image. The man once known as “The Maestro” had fallen into the orchestra pit and was struggling to preserve his prestige. After the release of his paper on Friday, there has been no shortage of criticism, despite Greenspan’s “enlightened” change of attitude concerning bank regulation. Greenspan’s refusal to admit the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy had anything to do with causing the crisis has placed him directly in the crosshairs of more than a few critics.
Sewell Chan of The New York Times provided this summary of Greenspan’s paper:
Mr. Greenspan, who has long argued that the market is often a more effective regulator than the government, has now adopted a more expansive view of the proper role of the state.
He argues that regulators should enforce collateral and capital requirements, limit or ban certain kinds of concentrated bank lending, and even compel financial companies to develop “living wills” that specify how they are to be liquidated in an orderly way.
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. . . Mr. Greenspan warned that “megabanks” formed through mergers created the potential for “unusually large systemic risks” should they fail.
Mr. Greenspan added: “Regrettably, we did little to address the problem.”
That is as close as Greenspan came to admitting that the Federal Reserve had a role in helping to cause the financial crisis. Nevertheless, these magic words from page 39 of “The Crisis” are what got everybody jumping:
To my knowledge, that lowering of the federal funds rate nearly a decade ago was not considered a key factor in the housing bubble.
The best retort to this denial of reality came from Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation. His essay entitled, “Explaining the Impact of Ultra-Low Rates to Greenspan” is a must read. Here’s how Ritholtz concluded the piece:
The lack of regulatory enforcement was a huge factor in allowing the credit bubble to inflate, and set the stage for the entire credit crisis. But it was intricately interwoven with the ultra low rates Alan Greenspan set as Fed Chair.
So while he is correct in pointing out that his own failures as a bank regulator are in part to blame, he needs to also recognize that his failures in setting monetary policy was also a major factor.
In other words, his incompetence as a regulator made his incompetence as a central banker even worse.
Paul La Monica wrote an interesting post for CNN Money’s The Buzz blog entitled, “Greenspan and Bernanke still don’t get it”. He was similarly unimpressed with Greenspan’s denial that Fed monetary policy helped cause the crisis:
This argument is getting tiresome. Keeping rates so low helped inflate the bubble.
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“The Fed wasn’t the sole culprit. But if not for an artificially steep yield curve, we probably would not have had a global financial crisis,” said John Norris, managing director of wealth management with Oakworth Capital Bank in Birmingham, Ala.
“Greenspan and Bernanke are missing the point. It all stems from monetary policy,” Norris added. “If you give bankers an inducement to lend more than they ordinarily would they are going to do so.”
From across the pond, Stephen Foley wrote a great article for The Independent entitled, “For the wrong answers, turn to Greenspan”. He began the piece this way:
The former US Federal Reserve chairman, the wizened wiseman of laissez-faire economics, shocked us all — and probably himself — when he told a congressional panel in 2008 that he had found “a flaw in the model I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak”. He meant that he had realised banks cannot be trusted to manage their own risks, and that markets do not smoothly self-correct.
But instead of taking that revelation and helping to point the way to a new, post-crisis financial world, he has shuddered to an intellectual halt. It is the same intellectual stop sign that Wall Street’s bankers are at. The failure to move forward is regrettable, dangerous and more than a little self-serving.
These reactions to Greenspan’s paper are surely just the beginning of an overwhelming backlash. The Economist has already weighed in and before too long, we might even see a movie documenting the Fed’s responsibility for helping to cause The Great Recession.
Still Wrong After All These Years
June 21, 2010
I’m quite surprised by the fact that people continue to pay serious attention to the musings of Alan Greenspan. On June 18, The Wall Street Journal saw fit to publish an opinion piece by the man referred to as “The Maestro” (although – these days – that expression is commonly used in sarcasm). The former Fed chairman expounded that recent attempts to rein in the federal budget are coming “none too soon”. Near the end of the article, Greenspan made the statement that will earn him a nomination for TheCenterLane.com’s Jackass of the Year Award:
John Mauldin recently provided us with a thorough explanation of why Greenspan’s statement is wrong:
Robert Reich’s refutation of Greenspan’s article was right on target:
This brings us back to my initial question of why anyone would still take Alan Greenspan seriously. As far back as April of 2008 – five months before the financial crisis hit the “meltdown” stage — Bernd Debusmann had this to say about The Maestro for Reuters, in a piece entitled, “Alan Greenspan, dented American idol”:
The day after Greenspan’s essay appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Howard Gold provided us with this recap of Greenspan’s Fed chairmanship in an article for MarketWatch:
Among the harsh critiques of Greenspan’s career at the Fed, was Frederick Sheehan’s book, Panderer to Power. Ryan McMaken’s review of the book recently appeared at the LewRockwell.com website – with the title, “The Real Legacy of Alan Greenspan”. Here is some of what McMacken had to say:
The ugly truth is that America has been in a bear market economy since 2000 (when “The Maestro” was still Fed chair). In stark contrast to what you’ve been hearing from the people on TV, the folks at Comstock Partners put together a list of ten compelling reasons why “the stock market is in a secular (long-term) downtrend that began in early 2000 and still has some time to go.” This essay is a “must read”. Further undermining Greenspan’s recent opinion piece was the conclusion reached in the Comstock article:
As always, Alan Greenspan is still wrong. Unfortunately, there are still too many people taking him seriously.
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