All Posts Tagged With: "Alan Greenspan"
Capital Letters
Is Greenspan Really Innocent of Causing the Housing Boom?
David Henderson and Jeff Hummel have written a remarkably pro-Greenspan article, “Was Money Really Easy Under Greenspan?” (www.tinyurl.com/cuf3ug). The authors overlooked several points that would undermine their portrayal of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan as an anti-inflationist and the best Fed chairman ever. (Better than Paul Volcker?) To [...]
Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond
Veteran financial writer James Grant describes himself as a “Grover Cleveland Democrat”—that is, someone who believes strongly in sound money, free trade, and very limited government. Mr. Market Miscalculates is a collection of his essays published in “Grant’s Interest Rate Observer” over the last decade. While most financial writers credulously accept the notion that central [...]
24Apr2009 | George C. Leef | Comments Off | ContinuedToo Big to Succeed
One widely cited culprit for the 2008 financial crisis was a supposed decision by the U.S. government not to regulate a relatively new type of financial instrument known as a credit default swap (CDS). In fact, this so-called “failure to regulate” refers to regulations that prohibited public trading of these instruments, concentrated risk in a small number of large firms, and massively increased the probability of a financial disaster. To add to the irony, one of the government officials most responsible for these interventions, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, recently apologized for having had too much faith in the free market when he should have apologized for not having had enough.
1Apr2009 | Less Antman | 2 comments | ContinuedGreenspan Should Be Shocked by Risky Lending?
Toward the end of his tenure as Fed chairman in early 2006, Alan Greenspan was the object of praise edging at times into adulation. It came from some unlikely sources. Milton Friedman penned an encomium for Greenspan in the pages of the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Greenspan Story: He Has Set a Standard.” After [...]
2Mar2009 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedBlack Swans, Butterflies, and the Economy
One side blames the market. The other blames government. We get two causal stories going in opposite directions and a lot of animus. But both perhaps are missing something important in this titanic debate about our current financial crisis. It’s time we exposed a complicated truth about the economy of the 21st century.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb [...]
Did Deregulated Derivatives Cause the Financial Crisis?
For a few months in 2008 I naively thought that the disastrous financial “rescue” actions led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would at least be counterbalanced by widespread recognition that our economic turmoil had been government’s handiwork.
How wrong I was. By the time of this writing, the mainstream press had delivered the “consensus” judgment that [...]
Was Money Really Easy Under Greenspan?
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has become everyone’s favorite scapegoat. His policies allegedly caused, or at least contributed to, the current financial crisis. He is attacked from the left for lax financial regulation, from the right for loose monetary policy, and from the middle for both. Yet two years ago, on leaving office, Greenspan [...]
2Mar2009 | David R Henderson and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel | 6 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – November 2008
Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Intervention
Edited by Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close
Independent Institute • 2007 • 291 pages
$15.95 papeerback Reviewed by Doug Bandow
It doesn’t seem to matter how badly America’s foreign policy of global intervention has failed. The governing elite advocate more and more extensive intervention.
Virtually every leading national political figure insists [...]
The Fed Didn’t Bail Out Wall Street? It Just Ain’t So!
In his New York Times column (“It’s Monetary Policy, Not a Morality Play,” September 9, 2007), Tyler Cowen decried the clichéd pattern of casting all financial stories into “simple moral narratives.” Although many commentators have questioned the Fed’s handling of the credit crunch last August and September, Cowen sees no hanky-panky:
Talk of a bailout is [...]
Subprime Monetary Policy
Gerald O’Driscoll is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and was formerly vice president and economic adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The comments of Brian Wesbury, William Long, and Maralene Martin are gratefully acknowledged. Parts of this article appeared in the author’s August 10 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Our Subprime Fed.”
In [...]
The Greenspan Fed in Perspective
Some readers of the Wall Street Journal might have been led to believe that Alan Greenspan had somehow followed Milton Friedman’s monetary rule. We now see, though, that there was no well-grounded rule; there was no standard.
1Jun2006 | Roger Garrison | 0 comments | Continued-
Latest Toon
-
Book Reviews
-
The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
