Immediately after his retirement in early 2006, Alan Greenspan was ubiquitous. Things quieted down a bit after that, but he could still be found at conferences and in the media, doing his bit to rewrite history in his own favour. He kept it up at the beginning of the credit crisis, too, but he's gone very quiet in recent weeks. He spoke at something called the Jeddah Forum in February, but he doesn't seem to be making as much of an effort as he once did to keep up his profile.
I wonder why. Maybe he's finding it hard to get insurance. I am a Greenspanophobe from way back, but lately I'm finding that bandwagon to be a bit crowded. People recognise that there's a key causal link between the idiotic monetary policies of the Greenspan years and the appalling mess in which the US financial system now finds itself, with unthinkable consequences for the entire global economy.
I did dig out a fairly recent piece by Greenspan, in the WSJ in December, where he offered his take on the credit crisis at that point in time. He tried to make out that it wasn't his fault, of course, but then (presumably inadvertently) explained exactly why it was. He blamed the very low pricing of risk in the years leading up to last summer's crunch, noting that such episodes had always ended in tears in the past.
Well now: why might risk have been underpriced since the start of the current century? Could it possibly have been because investors had been convinced by the behaviour of the Fed that it would always bail them out of any mistakes? Markets called that the "Greenspan put". History is more likely to remember him for that than for his supposed achievement in keeping US inflation low for so long -- credit for which has always rightly belonged in Beijing.
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