All Posts Tagged With: "Alan Greenspan"

Memo to Alan Greenspan: Keep Quiet

I’m getting tired of Alan Greenspan. First, the former Federal Reserve chairman blamed an allegedly unregulated free market for the housing and financial debacle. Now he favors repealing the Bush-era tax cuts. This has a certain sad irony. Recall that Greenspan once was an associate of Ayn Rand, the philosophical novelist who provided a moral [...]

22Oct2010 | John Stossel | 10 comments | Continued

The Failure of Keynesian Economics

That anyone can still believe Keynes’s General Theory holds any answers to the world’s economic problems is one of those sad facts that make one realize just how difficult it is to gain headway in the dismal science. An article on John Maynard Keynes in the Washington Post late last year, which argued that “Keynes’s [...]

25Jun2010 | Steven Kates | 19 comments | Continued

Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis

Free-market greed stands accused of undermining the world financial system, but that is a mistaken analysis, writes Johan Norberg. The Swedish author made famous by his book In Defence of Global Capitalism is back to provide an explanation for the current financial crisis. Many factors led to the global financial fiasco, Norberg writes, including a [...]

20May2010 | Waldemar Ingdahl | 20 comments | Continued

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?) [...]

21May2009 | mnolan | 0 comments | Continued

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 | Continued

Too 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 | 13 comments | Continued

Greenspan 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 | Continued

Black 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 [...]

2Mar2009 | Max Borders | 62 comments | Continued

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 [...]

2Mar2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 21 comments | Continued

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 | and and David R. Henderson | 7 comments | Continued

Did Greenspan Do It?

Nearly every free-market advocate believes that the ultimate cause of the current housing and financial mess is Alan Greenspan’s easy-money policy when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve. But now two solid free-market economists and researchers nonpareil — David Henderson and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel — have published a paper arguing that Greenspan did not [...]

12Nov2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Book 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 [...]

1Nov2008 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued

The Fed Didn’t Bail Out Wall Street?

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 [...]

1Jan2008 | Robert P. Murphy | 4 comments | Continued

Subprime Monetary Policy

In recent years monetary policy has been conducted so as to create an expectation that the Federal Reserve will bail out investors when asset bubbles deflate. Investors have come to bank on the Fed’s backing of risky ventures. The recent crisis in the subprime mortgage market is at least partly the outcome of this new [...]

1Nov2007 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 2 comments | Continued

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 W. Garrison | 1 comment | Continued

If Alan Greenspan Lived In Huntsville, Alabama!

I wish Alan Greenspan lived here. That way he’d know that there’s a Huntsville, Alabama, grocery chain selling chicken leg quarters for 29 cents a pound. That ain’t exactly a sign of inflation. Consequently, the next time the Federal Reserve Board met: Mr. Greenspan and his pals wouldn’t touch the button marked “mash to raise [...]

1Aug2002 | Ted Roberts | 0 comments | Continued

Capital Letters

Illusion of Collective Relevance? To the Editor: I read with interest Christopher Mayer’s article “Illusion of Control” (September 2001), in which he attempted to criticize the notion of economic forecasting. While few would dispute the claim that complex forecasts are not simple, Mayer used seemingly irrelevant statistics to make his case, and in doing so [...]

1Jan2002 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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