Hey Greenspan, You're Not Helping

Alan Greenspan tries to distance himself from the current financial mess in remarks today. I read his remarks in the middle of the night and will give them another read later. Amidst the turgid prose he seems to blame the whole thing on poor credit risk models that don't take into account the oddities of human behavior. Uh, wouldn't have been better if we'd had some regulation as the subprime market grew?

The problem wasn't the low interest rates, which some have unfairly blamed, for being the cause of all of this. It was the total lack of regulation that allowed a crazed market to grow crazily. What's worse, the Washington system of regulation of the credit markets, built for an age when Thurston Howell was the typical millionaire has grown into a wild, unchecked casino that the Nevada Gaming Commission would never tolerate.

Greenspan isn't wrong to blame the credit modeling for some of this but the fault, dear Alan, lies elsewhere...

Comments

[HilBily:]

Allow me please to connect some dots here: Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney convinces his sock puppet G W "Zippy" Bush, to attack a sovereign Middle Eastern nation, remove its ruler, and then occupy said nation until an agreeable and pliant government can be installed. In order to finance this adventure, Zippy jaw-bones Alan Greenspan into keeping interest rates low low low. This process started in 02 or 03, around the same time that the dollar began its steady march lower. No coincidence, that. Artificially low interest rates along with non-existent mortgage market regulation and new and inventive securitization of junk debt, combine to create a perfect shit-storm, called the sub-prime mess. Said mess, along with Zippy's utter disregard for fiscal balance(he loves those deficits), have led the country into a swamp. My question is only this: Why does it seem that everyone ignores the root cause of this--the stumbling, bumbling half-wit in the White House?

2008 Mar 17 01:59 PM

[hilo:]

hilBily,
There are many of us out here who whole-heartedly agree with you...the buck stops and began in the oval office this time..americans preferred to vote in a president that they thought was folksy, someone they wanted to sit down and drink a beer with...wonder if americans will ever see where they went wrong...seems obvious to me....

2008 Mar 17 03:47 PM

[User 164924:]

wonder what bu$hco/cheneyburton euro to dollar ratio of investment is?
They've screwed the pooch n we get to pay for it.....:(

2008 Mar 17 06:50 PM

[the final h...:]

if i invest in zimbabwe dollars now, and the us inflation rate becomes higher then theirs, do i gain purchasing power? or lose it?

2008 Mar 18 10:20 PM