austrian63

The Foundations of the Current Crisis: Don't Shoot the Messenger

RE: Greenspan's free market credentials: He may have favored free markets at one time, when he knew Ayn Rand, but it is not possible for someone to be "chairman of the federal reserve bank" which is not a creature of the free market but of government, and be a believer in free markets. Also, it was Greenspan, via the Fed, who created money out of thin air in the 1990's, bailed out LTCM in 1998, and re-flated the tech bubble into the real estate and general equity bubble of the 2000's. This is what interventionists do, not free markets.

Bernanke is cut from the same clothe.

People will never truly understand the causes of this crisis and the dangers of bank credit expansion and bubbles if they continue to believe, in error, that Greenspan was a free marketeer.


On Jun 04 03:59 PM Thomas J. Gordon wrote:

> I will spend a brief moment defending Bernanke here. He didnt' make
> the decision that the federal gov't spend massively in excess of
> the tax take. I am long tbt and I follow Paco so I like a lot of
> what he says. But many of these discussions demonize Greenspan and
> Bernanke and I don't know if I buy it. I don't think they have some
> secret agenda to debase the currency, for which they get some kind
> of personal financial reward. Greenspan has many and high quality
> free market credentials. I say in one of my articles that he drank
> tea in Ayn Rand's apartment. If the federal gov't was spending only
> what they take in in taxes I don't think they would even think about
> expanding the money supply. Yesterday Bernanke took political risk
> by reading Obama/congress the riot act about deficit spending. I
> personally give the guy some credit.