Thursday, March 19, 2009

Alan Greenspan's conflicting arguments to avoid responsibility

An eye-opening exposure of the faulty logic Alan Greenspan uses to defend himself:
ALAN GREENSPAN’s defence of the Federal Reserve in the formation of the housing bubble restates a familiar argument—it raised short-term interest rates but long-term interest rates did not follow, and housing is most sensitive to long-term rates. His proof includes the fact that long-term rates were low worldwide, and that many countries had bigger housing bubbles than America. The housing bubble’s source must therefore be global.

I agree with this analysis but I don’t agree that it exonerates the Fed. In the earlier part of this decade Mr Greenspan asserted on a number of occasions that while America might have local housing bubbles, there was no national housing bubble. Yet he now asserts there was a global housing bubble. It has always puzzled me how he could go from seeing local bubbles to a global bubble without at some point diagnosing a national bubble. By failing to diagnose a national housing bubble until it was already well inflated, the Fed under Mr Greenspan escaped the obligation to do anything about it.
I'm speechless.