Thursday, April 10, 2008
That Wall Street Journal interview/story of Greenspan:Here. Some excerpts: - "I was praised for things I didn't do," Mr. Greenspan said during one of three interviews at his sun-drenched office in downtown Washington, D.C. "I am now being blamed for things that I didn't do."
- Now 82 years old, Mr. Greenspan wants to set the record straight before the ink dries on the first draft of the financial crisis' history.
- Mr. Greenspan says he doesn't regret a single decision. In his view, many critics are ignoring evidence in his favor and failing to assess the process by which he made decisions.
- The criticisms that get under his skin are those from friends and former colleagues, many of them respected economists who backed his policies at the time but now say, in hindsight, that the calls were wrong. "I do take it seriously if my peers think I have misstated the facts," he says. "But where's the evidence? Too many people make accusations by assertion. I think it's improper."
- Mr. Greenspan now admits he was wrong about the improbability of a housing bubble. Yet he has long maintained that bubbles are an unavoidable feature of a dynamic economy. He pulls out a 1999 speech and shows, underlined in green marker, passages in which he warned of recurring but unpredictable patterns of overconfidence followed by investor panic. He does not share some foreign central bankers' belief that their job is to defend against excessive asset-price inflation: No sensible policy, he maintains, could have prevented the housing bubble.
- Mr. Greenspan says many of the criticisms against him are unjust. He is particularly perturbed by attacks over a 2004 speech in which he suggested that more borrowers would benefit from adjustable-rate mortgages. Interest rates were at a historical low at the time, which means that those who held on to the mortgages would have seen rates adjusted upward.
posted by Quiddity at 4/10/2008 08:36:00 PM
1 comments
"He is particularly perturbed by attacks over a 2004 speech in which he suggested that more borrowers would benefit from adjustable-rate mortgages."
He may have issued a retraction a couple of days later but looking back it's just a totally boneheaded statement. Hindsight is 20/20... yadda, yadda, yadda...
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