Sometimes the news media produces really shocking news items. Who could for example have imagined this: Alan Greenspan says he thinks credit expansion is a good thing, particularly praising mortgage loans and installment loans. I am sure everyone else is as surprised as I am. Maybe that explains why he has for years held real short-term interest rates at negative levels. One can only guess what more similarly shocking news could follow: maybe big agriculture will be revealed as supporting farm subsidies or maybe the teachers’ union will say they favor higher government spending on education.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/3444/shocking-news-greenspan-says-credit-expansion-is-a-good-thing/
Shocking news: Greenspan says credit expansion is a good thing
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He thinks he’s living in the 1950s. Must be Alzheimer’s.
I saw this at money.cnn.com earlier today and fired off a quick feedback that said: “Isn’t this guy ever going to jail?”
Knowing that Mr. Greenspan is a highly intelligent individual and given his intellectual background, I wonder if he really believes what he says when he makes comments of this nature. Or is it all for public consumption and part of the facade and deception that goes with his position.
Greenspan knows that if the working stooges ever come to their senses and stop buying we will have a crash that will blast us back to the 14th century.
Perhaps we have Mr. Greenspan all wrong. Perhaps he is playing the role of Francisco d’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged written for him by his mentor Ayn Rand. Maybe he is trying to prove that inflationism doesn’t work and that the only way to fix the system is to destroy it. Or perhaps he has been in Washington too long and he has sold out his principles for power and prestige. Either way, the effects are the same – only our post mortems will differ.
Greenspan simply never understood anything at all. He was a cultist, lost interest in the cult, and joined another (gov.). If one reads his “economic” defense of the gold standard, it is easy to see that he was hardly a great economic mind. It was far more about preaching the party line.
“Highly” intelligent may have been somewhat of an exaggeration on my part. Also, in some ways Rand and her group of followers can be labeled a cult, and there are certainly better defenses of the gold standard than Greenspan’s. However, he evidently did realize that it is extremely hard to make a large amount of money on Wall Street, and you will never be appointed to any position of influence at the Fed, if you support the gold standard.
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